Grades: Reynolds School of Journalism

Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - 12:49 AM

The Reynolds School of Journalism offers the undergraduate degree of journalism.

Click here to read the entire special report on grades.

The Reynolds School of Journalism values learning above grades, Dean Jerry Ceppos said.

In a study of grade distributions between colleges for last year, the Reynolds School of Journalism earned roughly 75 percent A’s and B’s for the spring semester of the 2008- 09 school year.
The main deviation between the Reynolds school and others was that the 75 percentage points were made up of mostly B’s with A’s making up just about a third in both semesters, where in other schools the difference is more evenly split.

The journalism school is counted among the professional schools at UNR, meaning that a number of its instructors have worked in journalism-related fields for most of their careers. Ceppos said he is unsure if this has an effect on grade distributions of his school, but either way he is happy for it to be the case.

Ceppos said that he does look at the grades between different sections of the same class, to ensure that things are uniform, but overall he said that he would like to try to find other ways aside from letter grades to measure if students are retaining the information.

“In all my years in newspapers, if I were going to hire you, it would never have occurred to me in a million years, no, two million years to check your grade in depth reporting,” Ceppos said. “I would just want to see what you had written.”

Journalism professor Rosemary McCarthy agreed that it is difficult in fields such as journalism to base everything on numbers, but said that it is a necessary part of school.

“With liberal arts, there are also subjective measurements that reflect progress,” she said. “There are a lot of things not measured in numbers. However, assignments are designed to get at very specific things, and we make sure that there are elements of those that can be measured.”

Jerri Cuerden can be reached at news@nevadasagebrush.com.