Speedy grades

BYU takes an excessively long time preparing grades. When I started at BYU in September 2004, grades were posted within five days of the end of semester. Now, grades can take anywhere from ten days to three weeks! What is BYU's excuse for this?

Some of us are planning on transferring, applying to graduate programs, applying to undergraduate programs, or just plain looking for summer jobs and we have to wait almost two weeks to find out whether we did well enough in our classes to continue on. This is very frustrating and I find myself being extremely upset that BYU takes so long. I asked some friends at other schools, including the U, how long their schools took to post grades. They all responded that their schools post grades in under a week!

Why does BYU "require" so much time to do something that other schools can finish a lot earlier? For those of us who need to know their grades in order to make future plans, we lose precious time waiting for professors and administrators to kick it into gear. We have a right to know our grades in a prompt manner so that we can make decisions about the future.

Stop being slow! While you may want a little extra time so you're not rushed, we suffer because we might miss deadlines for applications, miss out on getting a good job, or waste precious money in waiting for you to get down to work and put your grades in!

MICHELLE LITTLE
Ithaca, N.Y.

Wasting water

As a Utahn, I have grown up hearing about our desperate water situation and the drought. While I know that much of this is unwarranted worrying (we do live in a desert, droughts are expected), I was shocked when I saw BYU's water policies this spring.

Almost every day I see sprinklers on in the bright sun. Besides being an annoyance to walkers, this is wasteful since most of the water evaporates. Also, many of the sprinklers seem to go on with no supervision, as I have seen multiple lawns completely flooded, drowning the grass and wasting our precious resource. It is also common to see burst pipes leaking gallons of water by the minute with no one taking any action.

Now, I love the lush, green grass on campus as much as anyone, but it is not worth the waste of gallons of water every day. Simply watering at night is a logical solution and is also recommended for all private homes in Utah.

Set a timer and save our water! It's time BYU caught up with the rest of Utah.

ELISE VANDERHOOFT
Cottonwood Heights

Rationale

I know there's a rationale for everything. I'm sure that a guy driving a brand-new, seven miles-to-the-gallon Hummer had a good reason for buying that monstrosity. I'm sure Provo City had some kind of justification for building round-abouts in the middle of an urban, American city. And I'm pretty sure BYU's administration had some logic in blocking all campus computers from accessing the video sharing site, "YouTube." I'd really like to hear it.

YouTube is a social medium, the same as any search engine. It allows people to share creativity and ideas on a large scale. I see no logic in blocking YouTube from campus for many reasons, the first being that if we can't be trusted as students to watch what we decide is appropriate, then why do we have an "honor" code? Wouldn't it just be called "the code for people who can't monitor their behavior and so we have to restrict everything they do?" And anyway, we can find the videos from YouTube on campus. It just takes a little more digging and lot more inconvenience.

I say let us choose for ourselves what we watch and see if the idea of teaching correct principles and letting people govern themselves really does apply here.

ROBYNN GARFIELD
Bountiful

Stick or carrot

So our legislators are looking at tax incentives for corporations that retain and create jobs in the United States. They're using the wrong approach. How about using the stick instead of the carrot? In lieu of rewarding good corporate behavior, they should be taxing the bad behavior of those corporations which outsource jobs for the purpose of avoiding taxation.

PAUL G. JAEHNERT
Vadnais Hts., Minn.

Harvard's example

In 2004, 9 to 10 percent of the freshmen at Harvard received Pell Grants. Around that same time, 11 percent of the freshmen at BYU received Pell Grants. Across the nation, 28 percent of all undergraduates received federal financial aid (which is mostly comprised of Pell Grants).

In 2006, Harvard announced that parents whose annual incomes were below $60,000 would not have to pay for their child to attend Harvard. This has increased the number of students from low-income families who are attending Harvard. In fact, as of this year, 25 percent of the freshmen at Harvard are receiving federal financial aid. This movement at Harvard is catching on elsewhere and low-income families are finally finding it more possible to send their children to highly selective universities.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, about half of Mormon families earn less than $50,000 per year. My guess is that LDS families in this bottom half of the income scale receive less than 20 percent of the slots available for incoming freshmen at BYU.

Is this the most fair and equitable process for deciding who does and does not get to attend BYU? Would the proportion of freshmen at BYU from low-income families increase if BYU followed Harvard's example? Have we reached the point where low-income LDS families will find it more cost-effective to send their smart graduating seniors to Harvard rather than to BYU?

STERLING FLUHARTY
Rio Rancho, N.M.

Floor not trash

As a BYU custodian working in the JFSB, I take pride in cleaning up the building and making it look presentable so students and teachers can attend class in a nice environment. Imagine my surprise (and yet not surprised at all), that everyday when I enter classrooms to clean them I find trash everywhere, ranging from crumpled up paper to empty plastic bottles to old newspapers. I naively thought that since it is a predominantly LDS school, that students would maybe be a little more conscientious about making sure trash gets in the can, but this is not the case.

I realize a custodian's job is to clean, but what ever happened to "don't litter"? Just because you are inside a building doesn't mean that rule does not still apply. Would you like it if someone came over to your house and just threw an empty soda bottle on the floor because they didn't feel like walking over to the trash can? In the JFSB where most, if not all classes are held in the basement, there are trash cans and recycling bins at every corner. The farthest you'll have to walk is 20 feet.

I understand that maybe someone put an empty bottle on the floor, meaning to throw it away at the end of class, but then forgot to pick it up. I would suggest in that circumstance to throw whatever the trash item is, into your bag/backpack so that even if you forget to pick it up, it isn't left lying around. I don't mean to sound scolding or preachy, but from someone who does clean the buildings I feel we need to show respect by not making our campus a pigsty.

CLARISSA CLARK
Philadelphia, Pa.