Students will have four fewer weeks to drop courses due to a change in Boston University academic policy, according to a letter sent to Boston University faculty members from Provost Dennis Berkey.
Other academic policies and practices are being reviewed and considered for changes, according to the letter.
The new policy changes are a result of meetings with faculty and deans to discuss grading practices, Berkey said in an email to The Daily Free Press.
The letter cites a recommendation by the Committee on Academic Practices to change the policies on withdrawals, ‘W’ grades, Latin honors and the determination of course grading.
Students can currently withdraw from a course up to the last two weeks of the semester. Under the new policy, a student will only be allowed to drop a course before the eighth week of a semester.
The letter cited one of the reasons students dropped courses late in the semester was to maintain or improve their GPAs. The time wasted by weeks spent in the classroom was also another argument to change course policies, Berkey said.
College of Arts and Sciences professor Laurence Kotlikoff, a co-chair of the committee, said the changes stemmed from a recent examination of grade inflation and concern from faculty members.
Kotlikoff said he believed all students should be given an equal grading experience and noted some students use the current withdrawal policy incorrectly, which in turn can affect other students’ grades.
‘A small minority of students have taken advantage of the system,’ he said. ‘It biases the distribution of grades. That means people who would have a higher grade would have a lower one.’
Linda Wells, a co-chair of the committee and dean of the College of General Studies, said the eight-week proposal was still being discussed and may be shortened down to five weeks in the future.
‘There is some interest in moving [the drop date] to the fifth week, where you can withdraw without having a ‘W’ on your transcript,’ Wells said.
However, Berkey said some administrators and faculty felt it should be earlier, and hoped there would be discussion on this topic from all sides, including students.
‘In my memorandum to faculty I invited comment from anyone on this matter,’ Berkey said. ‘I extend that invitation to students as well.’
The reporting of a ‘W’ grade on transcripts will also no longer be recorded by the faculty member under the new policy. Students who wish to withdraw from a class can only do so through the Registrar’s office. Any grade of ‘W’ assigned by a professor will be accepted by the Registrar’s office, according to the letter.
The new withdrawal policy is scheduled to begin starting Jan. 1 of next year, while other recommendations of the committee are still being considered before implementation.
One of the other topics the committee discussed was the job of determining course grades and determining whether or not graduate teaching fellows should be responsible for assigning final course grades.
‘We have clarified the responsibility of faculty to assign grades, not to delegate this responsibility to TFs,’ Berkey said. ‘This will help ensure that each student’s grade is thoughtfully determined by the professor in the course.’
Kotlikoff said this was not much of a change to the old policy, but a reaffirmation of the job of the faculty and their responsibility to students.
‘Faculty members need to be able to justify grades,’ Kotlikoff said. ‘This is really a clarification to everyone that the faculty member needs to be fully involved in [determining] the final grade.’
A third recommendation included changes to the Latin honors system. Under the new policy, Latin honors would be reduced to a university wide 30 percent of students, by school, based on percentile rankings of GPA, with the top five percent receiving Summa Cum Laude, the next 10 receiving Magna Cum Laude and the next 15 receiving Cum Laude.
The honors recommendations, which will not be implemented next semester, will be discussed at the December meeting of the University Council, and possibly implemented in time for the May 2004 commencement, according to the letter.
The committee also discussed the possibility of adding a notation on transcripts giving syntax of the course, the student’s grade, the total number of students, and the average grade for the course. Wells said she thought adding this to the transcript would give context to the course.
Currently, few schools in the country have these notations on their transcript. Dartmouth College recently adopted the practice, according to Wells.
Berkey said although the notation was being discussed, the committee had not reached a strong consensus on the subject.
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