2020–2021
The Case for Credit/No Credit
A year into the pandemic, CUNY had let one of its few real protections for students lapse. Credit/No Credit, the option that lets a student take a passing grade without the number scarring their GPA, had carried the university through 2020 and then expired. With remote classes still grinding on, Victor Kiani made restoring it his fight.
Credit/No Credit is a small mercy with large consequences. A student drowning in a semester they never signed up for, a shared laptop, a sick parent, a job lost, can take the credit and keep the grade off their record. In an ordinary year it is paperwork. In 2021 it was the difference between a hard semester and a permanent mark.
The same course. A different effect on the record.
The same passing course
How it appears on the recordKeep the letter grade
Grade counts toward GPA
The course earns credit. Its letter grade also enters the GPA calculation.
Choose the credit option
Credit without the GPA effect
The course still earns credit. The Credit notation keeps the letter grade out of the GPA calculation.
Protecting a student’s progress through an exceptional semester.
Kiani advised the CUNY University Student Senate's Chair of Fiscal Affairs and Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs. The Senate is the student government for the entire university, all 25 campuses and roughly 271,000 degree students. He had no vote there. What he had was the floor of its Academic Affairs Committee, and he was relentless with it, making the case for Credit/No Credit meeting after meeting. He pressed the committee's chair to secure it fast, and the answer matched the urgency:
Yes we can.
When the committee weighed surveying students across all 25 campuses before putting the policy forward, Kiani argued it down: the survey would only cost time the semester did not have. Credit/No Credit was not a contested idea, it was relief no one needed convincing of; a survey is how you pressure-test a radically new proposal, not how you deliver an obvious one.
The senate's officers came to rely on him for it. Its Chair of Fiscal Affairs spoke highly of him; its Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs asked him to keep doing on the committee exactly what he had become known for:
Please continue to be the fierce fighter you are at our AAC meetings.
And where Kiani did have a vote, he cast it. At Queensborough, as Executive Vice President of the student government, he voted for Credit/No Credit for the college's students, and it passed.
- Campuses in the CUNY system he advised
- 25
- Degree students across the system
- 271,000
Figures: CUNY enrollment, 2020–21.
Credit/No Credit had carried CUNY's students through the worst of the pandemic, and Kiani fought to keep it within their reach when it still mattered, on a committee where he could not vote and a campus where he could. It was the same instinct behind everything he did at CUNY: find the lever that reaches students where the year actually hurt them, and pull it before the moment closed.