Although Dartmouth does not allow students to take courses under a pass-fail option, the College offers the next best thing: the Non-Recording Option. The NRO, as it is more commonly known, enables students to elect courses out of their comfort zone without fear of destroying their grade point average.
Obviously, it is necessary to place certain restrictions on the NRO, specifically in regards to prohibiting its use in courses that fulfill major requirements. Beyond those restrictions, however, students should be free to take any other courses under the NRO, provided that they have not already exhausted their three opportunities to receive a grade of "Non-Recorded." Unfortunately though, individual departments are given the choice of whether or not to allow the use of the NRO in certain courses they offer. What is worse, departments are allowed to place the entirety of their course offerings out of bounds for the NRO.
The fact that departments such as government, economics, music and studio art, prevent students from using the NRO in any of their courses is unacceptable. If Dartmouth is going to offer the NRO in the first place, then why disenfranchise so many students from using it in the very situations it was designed for? I contacted administrators from the government and economics departments asking for explanations of their anti-NRO policy but received no reply from either department. It can only be assumed then that departments such as government and economics that do not allow use of the NRO are exercising a sort of departmental elitism in which they disallow use of the NRO simply because they would prefer that all students taking courses in their departments receive letter grades. If Dartmouth is going to offer the NRO in the first place, such extreme latitude in its limitation should not be granted to individual departments.
This lack of uniformity allowed by the registrar all together defeats the purpose of the NRO. Why should I, as a government major, be allowed to take most science courses -- not counting towards distributive requirements -- under the NRO, while a science major who may be equally uneasy about taking a course in the humanities is not allowed to do the same while taking a government course? I have wanted to take a studio art course for some time now but have chosen to put it off because I have heard grading horror stories about that department and am not allowed to use the NRO for the purpose it was intended.
In fact, the use of NROs should be allowed for distributive and world culture requirements as well. Students would still need to take and receive credit for these courses and, in this way, would satisfy the purpose behind the distributive requirements of a well-rounded education. Students who know that they will likely do poorly in a particular class required for a distributive requirement should not be forced to hurt their GPA by taking that course when they will be competing for jobs and graduate school admission with many applicants coming from equally elite schools with no distributive requirements to speak of.
The NRO should not be viewed by departments and professors as a license for students to do poorly in a class. Most students at Dartmouth are highly intelligent, highly motivated individuals who want to succeed regardless of what is at stake. Even taking a class under the NRO, students like myself strive to achieve the grade limit they have set for the class, both to benefit their GPA and preserve the use of the NRO for a later time. In terms of controlling abuse of the NRO, the three-NRO limit sufficiently deals with this potential problem.
On the whole, the frequency with which classes are placed out of bounds for the NRO does a disservice to students. It discourages students from taking classes in which they are interested but in which they know they may struggle to make the grade. With so many barriers placed on its use, I wonder if it makes sense for Dartmouth to offer the NRO at all.
