The Towerlight, April 27, 1979

tl19790427-000 "PUBLISHED BY THE STUDENTS OF TOWSON STATE UNIVERSITY VOL. LXXII No. 24 Springfest Weather Fair today with a 70 percent chance of rain. High in the 60s. Low tonight in the 40s, chance of rain Saturday and fair Sunday. High both days in the 60s. April 27, 1979 Council expands terms by Katherine Dunn The Academic Council voted Mon-day to retain mini-mester as it ad-justed the 1980 academic calendar to meet the State Board of Higher Education requirement that state universities hold 15-week semesters. Students are required to attend 2,250 minutes of classroom instruction and six days of examinations. The Council chose the second of three proposals offered by the registrar's office. This proposal has fall classes starting before Labor Day so the semester would be over by Christmas. Spring vacation is not af-fected at all, but the spring semester extends into the first week of June. The third proposal was quickly re-jected by the Council because it did away with mini-mester. Classes would have extended into the middle of January so that they could start after Labor Day. The greatest agreement among the Council was they they wanted the semester to be over by Christmas. This also would keep mini-mester. Proposal One, which had only one difference�a shortened spring vaca-tion� ran a close second to the second because classes would be over by the end of May. Spring vacation caused a majority of debate. Some Council members wanted to change the break and place it exactly in the middle of the semester rather than at Easter. Others were in favor of eliminating it altogether, as in proposal one, and giving only Good Friday and Easter Monday. Most Council members felt that classes ending in the end of May was more compatible with the summer schedule. Most of them felt that the only practical summer schedule had to have the traditional two five-week day sessions and the one seven-week evening session. They eliminated the other three proposals: two of them called for four-week day sessions which the Council felt were too short, and the other called for only one day' session. There are still some problems with the adopted summer school plan. Act-ing President Joseph Cox said that the majority of first-session day school students are teachers taking graduate studies courses. But with the new plan, the summer session starts on June 9 and the teachers are still in class. Cox proposes that the summer ses-sion be amended to include two night sessions: one early at 4:30 and the other at the usual time of 7. That way, he said, the teachers could attend the early classes and the registrar could offer the majority of education courses then. A special relationship There's one York Road liquor emporium that has a special relationship with this campus. Maybe not quite as special as the one with these young ladies, but still quite unique. Check out Ross and his characters on page 6. � TL photo by Lester Shugarinan Speech tourney puts TSU speakers on map by Theresa Gilmore The team of Barbara Blake and Bill Klumpp placed third in the National Junior Varsity Debate Tournament April 6-8th at Kent State University leading the Towson Forensics Union in a week of competition on a national level. The third place finish marked the first time in several .years that any Towson team got past the quarter finals in national competition. Klumpp also won the award of ""Ninth Speaker in the Country"" on the junior varsity level, an award based on the persuasiveness and speaking quality of the debator. Mikey Wilson, who debated with Ken Geiseman at the tournament, said, ""Towson did extremely well considering that we started from scratch last year. Almost all the other teams had much more experience competing on a national level."" ""We've really come much further than the other teams,"" she said. � Some of the ""other teams"" included, George Mason University (first place), Akron University (second place), Ohio State, Ohio University, West Virginia, Howard and Bolling Green Universities. ""Most of the really good schools are from' the Midwest and the big schools all go to the varsity tournament,"" Wilson added. The Forensics Union also sent three students to the American Forensics Competition at Iowa State University the same weekend -for a speech tournament. Cathy Hanson competed in both the ""After Dinner Speech"" and ""Persuasive"" categories; Bob Rob-ertson competed in the ""Extempor-aneous"" and ""Communication Analysis"" categories, and Todd Stockman competed in the ""Infor-mative"" category doing a ventrilo-quism piece with his dummy, ""Shaun."" All five of the speeches broke to the quarter final level which was the first time that the Towson had done that well on a national level. ""Todd and Shaun"" ended up placing fourth in the country while Hanson placed third in the ""Persuasive"" category. While Robertson didn't place, he said, ""everyone's speeches were well received by the judges. We were all pleased with our perfor-mances. The third tournament that week took place at the ""Speech and Debate Fraternity National Conven-tion"" in St. Louis. Since it was mainly a convention, competition wad downplayed and the competi-tors were not given a final place ranking. They, instead, were given certificates of ""Excellence"" or ""Superior."" Peggy Benzinger, the only Tow-son student to go, won a certificate of ""Excellence,"" meaning that she placed in the top 20 per cent of the 80-95 competitors in the event (group discussion). More than 500 students from 115 schools representing every part of the country attended the confer-ence. Right now, five students, Robert-son, hanson, Fran Mindel, Sharon Ecker and Bev Creamer, are at the National Forensics Competition in Wisconsin, and immediately follow-ing that, Robertson and Hanson will drive on to Kansas City for a final tournament. Schelle quits by Katherine Dunn With a Presidential search al-ready underway there will soon be a vice-presidential search at Towson State to replace Wayne Schelle, vice-president for business and finance. Schelle resigned this week to take a position as vice-president for development at Loyola College. Schelle, who first came to the University in 1966 as director of business and Finance, will officially leave his office May 15. Acting-president Joseph Cox is expected to name an acting vice-president today. A nationwide search will be conducted to find a permanent replacement. Cox said, at the Academic Council meeting Monday, that unless the Council strongly objected he would go ahead and start the procedure for finding a new vice-president, but in the interest of time, I would go ahead and write a job description and place ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Sun, the Washington Post, the Afro-Amer-ican and possibly the New York Times."" The Council supported Cox's suggestion and he will go ahead with it. He said he would establish a closing date of June 15 for all applications, because by June 15 the new President will have been selected. He would then come into office and choose his own vice-pres-ident. The main reason Schelle gave for his resignation was that his job changed from one primarily con-cerned with expansion in which he was most interested. Now that the University is , almost finished the expansion, both in construction and in student enrollment, his job would become one of just dealing with the bureaucrats in Annapolis. ""Now that expansion is ending and my job will become internal, it left me with dealing with state bureaucrats, and without the excite-ment of growth, I'm left with basicaly a maintenance effort,"" said Schelle. Schelle ahs been considering moving on for almost a year, since former-president James Fisher left the University to take a position with CASE in Washington, D.C. ""It was the end of an era,"" Schelle said. During that era Fisher, Schelle and Dr. Kenneth Shaw, then vice-president for academic affairs, were a team, he said. They planned the expansion of Towson State. Now, that expansion is coming to an end with the expected finish of Education Street this summer and the renovation of Van Bokkelen Hall next year. Schelle said that he was first contacted by the Rev. Joseph Sellinger, S.J., President of Loyola College in September. They discus-sed it in more detail in December and Schelle finally accepted the position. ""I feel it's not only more Should grade scale be expanded? Pros and cons of pluses and minuses by Michael Bennett In response to an informed Towerlight survey, 36 of 50 faculty members indicated they are not completely satisfied with Towson State's grading system. Thirty of the faculty members reacted favorably to the idea of expanding the present grading system to include pluses and minuses. Many of the faculty members favor the addition of plus grades but feel that minuses would make the system too complicated. The survey included faculty members from the mathematics, business administration, art, music, chemistry, biology and philosophy departments. A grading system using pluses is in use at Loyola College and is being considered at Johns Hopkins Uni-versity. At Loyola it is possible for a student to receive a B+ , which is calculated as a 3.5 on a four point scale, and a C + , which is a 2.5. Francis McGuire, Dean of under-graduate studies at Loyola, said, ""In general people are satisfied. We've been using this system for ten years and nobody has complained. The system allows a teacher to better describe a student's perform-ance. I feel the plus system most benefits the better student, because when a student's grade is just short of an A, teachers are often reluctant to give the student a break and raise the grade to an A."" According to Billie Walker, assistant director of public informa-tion at Johns Hopkins University, a similar plan is being discussed at Johns Hopkins. Acting-President Joseph Cox said grade reform is a subject that comes up every couple of years. ""The problem,"" Cox said, ""is that if a student consistently does 78 work you have to give him a C, but is it fair that a student who does 70 work will get the same C?"" Cox said two years ago he proposed that the University look into the grading system used by U.C.L.A. ""At U.C.L.A. they discovered that the average grade in an introductory course had risen from a C in 1965 to a B in 1975. In.order to stem grade inflation and recognize the difference between an 80 and an 88, they came up with a system in which the four point scale is broken down into tenths,""said Cox. According to Cox, under the U.C.L.A. system an 80 student would receive a 3.0 and an 88 student would get a 3.8. In the Towerlight survey, only 13 of 50 faculty members favored such a plan. (However, the complex U.C.L.A. system was only briefly described in the questionnaire.) Cox said a strictly numerical system would offer the greatest precision in grading, but he also said a grading system must be applicable to all of the varied disciplines within the University. ""A numerical system makes sense in the abstract, but it tends to break down in non-quantitative disciplines such as music and art,"" he said. Cox stressed that, since 95 percent of the schools in the country are on the A, B, C scale, we would have to make sure that any change away from the standard grading system would not penalize students going to graduate school. Dean Norman Sheets, vice-presi-dent for academic affairs, said he thinks the addition of pluses and minuses to grades would not be worth the trouble. He said the problems in administration would surpass any advantages. According to Sheets, any proposal to change the grading system would first have to be brought before the Academic Standards Committee and then passed by the Academic Council. Dean Thomas Knox, associate dean of students, favors the addition of pluses and minuses. ""i'd like to see it, because it would be more precise. I don't see any problems that couldn't be worked out,"" he said. Knox said a more precise grading system would benefit Towson graduates in the job market, because it would give employers a more accurate idea of the student's achievement. Gerard Sartori, university regis-trar, said any change in the grading system would require a complete conversion of the computer program for grading. Sartori said that, while the Board of Trustees does not set University grading policy, they have estab-lished guidelines which have been agreed upon by all of the institutions controlled by the board. Since all six schools use the same computer, all six schools must use consistent symbols for the computer to be put to efficient use, he said. Even if the University did decide to change its grading system, change would still be slow, because we would have to wait until the change could be worked into the computer, Sartori said. Sartori also said he thinks grade inflation reached its peak in 1975 and has leveled off. He said the percentage of students making the Dean's List and graduating with honors has gone down. He feels this is due largely to the return of the F grade and the elimination of the NC (no credit) grade. The University replaced the NC with the F in 1976. Several faculty members believe grade inflation is caused by a failure to strictly apply present standards. A member of the chemistry department said, ""What is wrong with the current system is that it is not applied consistently, nor is it applied according to the definitions. C is defined as average, yet the average grade is B in most departments. Unless T.S.U. has strict standards of excellence, A's will mean nothing to those outside. This can already been seen by pre-med students who find that A's from Towson are not considered equal to A's from the University of Maryland."" A member of the music depart-ment said, ""Students usually expect a B or better. When the majority of my classes average C .grades, the students register discontent, yet No One spends 'two hours per each hour of class time' (University Catalogue) in class preparation."" challenging but more financially rewarding,"" said Schelle. Money is a serious consideration for Schelle in leaving the University. But he said that making more money personally is only a minor part of his change. The major problem that he has had since he first came to the University has been getting money for the school. Where the University is part of the system of state colleges and universities, Loyola is indepen-dent. Every year he tries to get more money for the Upiversity but the University has always been allocat-ed the least amount of money of any of the six schools in the system. � ""Even the Board [of Trustees] is less positive for things at Towson,"" said Schelle, ""but the Board at Loyola has only Loyola to worry about not six colleges."" ""The higher education system is very disorganized,"" said Schelle. ""Salaries are too low. The state college system is given minimum priority compared to the University of Maryland and the community college system."" ""Even the community colleges pay more money from the President on down. I wish the state would place more emphasis, if not on the whole state college system, then on Towson State... Wayne Schelle ""During the period I've been here I had hopes that their case of blind neglect of Tow4on would be corrected, but after 12 years when you still reach resistance to almost everythng you have to do, I just didn't want to be naive and think thngs would change to our benefit."" Schelle said that there has been resistance to almost everything they have ever wanted to do at the University. It took 10 years to get Education Street. ""It seemed the better you did the fewer dollars were provided because continued on page 15 In this Issue Ferrante benefit Back in the early 70's, Joe Ferrante was a standout middie for the TSU lacrosse team. Known for his hustle, desire, and dedication, Fer-rante died tragically of leukemia just six weeks ago. Wednesday night his friends, lacrosse and other-wise, will pay tribute to Joe and try to help defray some of the outstanding medical costs incurred by his family by playing the varsity-alumni game at the Towson Stad-ium, beginning 7:30 p.m. Story on page 11. Peer Gynt Henrik lbsen's classic play is also part of the Springfest activities. There are 8 p.m. performances tonight and tomorrow night in the Fine Arts Building. Story on page 7. "