Story by Bethany Lee
Graphic by Liza Park
In the fall of 2020, Maxfield Palmer found out that he had lost his childhood pet of more than 10 years, only a few weeks after losing another.
He was taking CHEM 102 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the time, one of the most difficult chemistry classes in the department, sometimes thought of as a “weed-out” class for potential chemistry majors.
And his exam was in 20 minutes.
He sent an email to his chemistry professor explaining the situation: “I can’t do this. I’m a complete mess right now. I can’t focus. If I take this exam, I’m gonna fail it for sure.”
He expected an immediate no. Preparing for the worst, he tried to pull himself out of his frantic state to take the exam. Then he heard back from his professor:
“That’s totally fine! Take a day to get yourself together and you can take it at the same time tomorrow.”
Palmer, now a senior biology major, rarely saw that kind of grace from his professors, especially in STEM departments, where a mental health emergency was considered a feigned excuse to get out of an exam. But ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, he’s noticed more of a willingness to offer students accommodations like open-note tests, softer attendance policies, and extensions based on mental and physical health.
“A lot of STEM professors prior to the pandemic would have just been like, ‘I don’t care, take it anyway.’ Now it feels like there’s a lot more forgiveness,” Palmer said.
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The new posture toward student success follows two long years of reckoning with the impacts of the pandemic. In 2020, the UNC-Chapel Hill administration began to incorporate “Wellness Days” (now “Well-being Days”), and added them back to the calendar in the fall of 2021 after a string of suicides and attempted suicides devastated the campus community.
Besides mental health accommodations, the university introduced emergency grading policies, like extending its Pass/Fail options to allow students to declare any and all classes pass/fail without negative impacts on their general education or degree requirements. UNC also allowed students to receive “CV” and “WCV” notations on their transcripts to denote classes that were incomplete or withdrawn from due to adverse effects from COVID-19.
Two years later, most of the emergency policies have reverted back to pre-COVID standards, even as student performance, expectations and accommodations seem fundamentally changed by the pandemic.
Take grade appeals, for example. The process allows a student to argue that they deserved a better grade than the one they received, on the grounds of things like arbitrariness, malice, or discrimination. Resolving such a request can take up to a year. Chloē Russell, associate dean of advising at UNC, said that when she came into her current role in 2020, she had been told to expect 2 or 3 grade appeals per semester.
Between the spring and summer of 2022, she has already received about 40.
“We’re easing back into this,” Russell said. “The idea that we can go back to 2019 – I just don’t think it’s really possible.”
At the same time, Russell doesn’t think students asking for more accommodations necessarily reflects new needs from students. They might just be more comfortable talking about what they need, a result of the pandemic exacerbating mental health issues.
“It brought a magnifying glass to things that were already in existence,” Russell said.
Stress wasn’t new, but talking about it was.
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Differences in student expectations might be more likely in undergraduate classes than professional or graduate ones, according to Sheyenne Shropshire, an adjunct faculty member at UNC and a fourth-year law student at North Carolina Central University.
Shropshire said the students she teaches at UNC are bolder about accommodation requests than her peers in law classes.
“I think their expectations are different,” Shropshire said about undergraduate students. “They expect more leniency, maybe not as firm in the grading; they expect attendance to be more flexible.”
That’s not the case in law school, where generally older students are preparing for a standardized exam.
“We’ve had to work in stressful situations and we’ve learned to adapt,” she said. “I think for people who are undergraduates, this is the first – for most of them – major situation that they’ve been through. Their only point of reference is the pandemic.”
Shropshire teaches in the journalism school at UNC, which has encouraged its faculty to give students the benefit of the doubt.
An email sent in August 2021 by Dr. Charlie Tuggle, the senior associate dean of undergraduate studies in the school of journalism, reflects those policies. It encourages professors to be “empathetic and accessible” and discourages being “absence police.” The email recommends that professors record their lectures and make students aware of available accommodations.
Tuggle calls this outlook “ultimate grace.”
“We take students at their word and work with them as much as possible. However that works out for you as an individual instructor is up to you,” Tuggle said. “Does that mean you extend deadlines or that you do other things that would help that student? Maybe.”
Tuggle said the journalism school is not alone in encouraging grace, but was inspired by the administration for the College of Arts and Sciences, which includes the bulk of undergraduate majors at UNC.
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It’s no secret that student academics have suffered since 2020. From elementary to university classrooms, students are struggling to meet benchmarks. ACT scores hit their lowest point in 30 years in 2021. To make matters worse, the majority of students on college campuses have no concept of what college looked like before Zoom, and the transition has been rocky.
Even students who were enrolled at UNC pre-COVID have noticed a change in their habits. Maxfield Palmer, a senior, said he always used to do the readings for his classes before they started, if only an hour before. That changed when classes went online.
“It felt like it made me lazier,” Palmer said. “With COVID I was doing the reading while the professor was speaking. I’d have my camera off and I’d be muted, and I would just be doing it literally as we were talking about it so I could get my participation in.”
For better or for worse, the pandemic also fast-tracked digital education, forcing students to rely on laptops and WiFi to complete their classwork. Even after restrictions have lifted, many of those new modes of instruction stuck around. Most UNC professors still use Zoom to record their in-person lectures, allow students to join from home or host regular class meetings online.
Annelise Collins, a senior Journalism major, said she thinks the dependence on technology has hurt student academics.
“Everyone would get so much more out of their education if they just closed their computers in class and didn’t online shop,” Collins said.
In her classes, she often finds herself one of the few people without a computer open, and one of the few participating in the discussion.
“No one is thinking,” she said. “And I always wonder, Carolina has this big name to it, but what is it actually if the students who come have the qualifications, but they don’t have the mindset?”
UNC, like any university, has competing interests. To uphold its reputation, the university must meet academic standards. To keep students enrolled, it must appease the student body. To retain faculty members, it must make professors happy.
“Academic institutions are extremely valuable, they have a lot to teach.” Sheyenne Shropshire said. “But at the same time, they make money, and so they are businesses as well. I think there’s always going to be a balance between giving the students the academic experience they need in order to succeed and making it a pleasant experience so that they’ll send their kids there too.”
In a post-pandemic world, that balance gets harder and harder to find.
