A week before it begins its annual budgeting process, the Undergraduate Assembly turned its attention to technology and grades at its weekly general body meeting on Sunday.
Among other things, the UA passed the PennApps Labs Provost Funding Resolution.
The resolution — which was approved unanimously — pledges $7,500 per year in support of PennApps Labs, pending final approval of the UA budget at a meeting on Feb. 26. It also asks the Provost’s Office to match those funds, bringing the total PennApps Labs contribution to $15,000 a year.
Engineering junior Amalia Hawkins, the marketing and operations lead of PennApps Labs, said the $15,000 in combined funding would provide PennApps Labs with enough resources to work at full capacity.
To provide support for PennApps Labs’ — and other developers’ — push for easier access to Penn data, the UA also unanimously passed the Open Data Initiative Resolution.
In the resolution, the UA encouraged the University to create an “Open Data Initiative” to make data in various institutional repositories public and machine readable. Such data feeds include real-time bus location data, dining hall menus, building data and job listings, among other things.
“This is mostly to encourage student innovation in general and this would give them a way to access information in a better manner,” said Hawkins, who explained that currently, innovation at PennApps Labs has “hit a stumbling block” due to the limited access to Penn data.
Engineering junior and UA Representative Matt Rosenberg, the author of the resolution, added that this initiative is already gaining traction at other schools, including Oxford, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon universities.
“This can be done now, but they just don’t publish this information,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t want to wait 20 years.”
In addition to passing the two resolutions on Sunday, the UA also debated the pros and cons of including course grade averages on student transcripts, starting with the Class of 2016.
The idea — which was brought up by College and Wharton sophomore Abe Sutton, the UA’s academic affairs director — is to list the average grade received in a class next to the grade the student received in order to provide employers with more information about students’ academic performance.
“I think it will reward people who strive to challenge themselves,” Sutton said, adding that currently, students may be penalized for taking more difficult classes with more difficult curves.
Other UA members, however, were worried that such a policy would increase the competitive academic environment at Penn.
“For someone like an athlete who doesn’t have the time to take more challenging classes, this would probably hurt them,” College freshman and UA Representative Gabe Delaney said.
Nursing junior and UA Representative Spencer Stubbs agreed, adding that “it would only fuel the fire of competitiveness.”
Senior UA members who have been through the on-campus recruiting process, though, spoke from experience that more context is often better.
“Potential employers should know what classes are more difficult, but they don’t, so they need some way to find out,” said Wharton senior and UA Vice President Faye Cheng. “We can’t count on external parties to know what classes are more difficult.”
Wharton and Engineering senior and UA President Tyler Ernst agreed.
“Employers are really clueless,” he said. “This is really going to benefit you.”
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