Oberlin students denied grading 'reprieve'

President and the college's deans opted not to grant the reprieve after giving the request serious consideration.

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(Photo: WKYC)


OBERLIN, Ohio -- Students at Oberlin College asked for a "mercy reprieve" for their grades because hundreds of students participated in demonstrations in Oberlin and Cleveland in the wake of the fatal police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the shooting death of Michael Brown by a suburban St. Louis officer and the death of Eric Garner in New York, according to the student newspaper The Oberlin Review.


President Marvin Krislov responded with an email to students on Sunday, saying he and the college's deans opted not to grant the reprieve after giving the request serious consideration.

"We are in firm agreement that suspending grading protocols is not the way to achieve our shared goal of ensuring that students have every opportunity and resource to succeed," he wrote.

"People's communities are being mercilessly murdered and beaten in the streets every day around the world," junior Kiki Acey, a student who helped draft the petition, wrote in a Facebook post, according to The Oberlin Review. "Others are being locked away by the millions for petty crimes. And many of us are still working every day just to be able to afford this education that fails to tell us how to free ourselves."

READ: The Oberlin Review article 'Students Fight for Academic Leniency'

The petition was given to Krislov on Friday.

"Administrators should require professors to exercise complete flexibility in what students are saying they can produce academically," the petition reads..

"Students in this moment should have complete access to alternative modes of learning while we process what's happening. Basically, no student, especially black students and students of color, should be failing a class this semester. A 'C' should be the lowest grade students can receive this semester."

Final exams begin Wednesday.

More than 1,300 students signed the petition, which calls for a "no-fail mercy period," the student newspaper reported. This would make a C the lowest grade possible, eliminating failing grades.

Any "student" that signed that petition should immediately and permanently be barred from any college in the U.S. because they obviously aren't college material.

This has to be the stupidest idea of the year.

"stupidest" idea indeed.