Freshman forgiveness expanded

Kristine Gill

Starting next spring, students won’t have to be a freshman to take advantage of freshman forgiveness.

In the past, if freshmen received a C- or lower, they could retake the course and the new grade would replace the old one. They had to retake the classes during their first 30 hours and retaken before their 60th hour.

Under the new policy, any student — even seniors — can retake a 10000 or 20000 level class for a higher grade, regardless of what grade they received for the course. Individual colleges may impose their own restrictions. Now the best grade, and not necessarily the most recent grade, will be counted.

University Registrar Glenn Davis said changes to the course repeat policy were made because of the switch to the new computer system, Banner.

“They were not able to replicate the old system in the new one,” Davis said. “Technically it wasn’t possible to do it.”

LuEtt Hanson, associate dean of the College of Communication and Information, said modifying Banner to accommodate the old policy would have cost too much.

“Banner pushed us to change, but maybe changing wasn’t such a bad idea,” she said. “We would have stayed with the old policy but realized this is complicated and hard to explain.”

Elizabeth Sinclair, associate dean of the College of Business, said students can take the course as many times as they want, but that individual colleges may impose their own restrictions on the number of times a course can be repeated.

Hanson said 1,249 students took advantage of the repeat policy during fall semester of 2005.

“Maybe there will be a larger number of students who will see this as an advantage and use it in a way they couldn’t before,” Davis said.

Sinclair said she doesn’t expect a huge increase in the number of students who will take advantage of the new policy. She said other colleges did not experience an increase when they made similar changes to their policies.

Hanson said she hopes all students considering a course repeat will see their adviser before deciding because it could end up slowing some students down in their plans for graduation.

“This is not a one-size-fits-all,” Hanson said.

Contact student affairs reporter Kristine Gill at [email protected].