Last Monday, the Tufts faculty approved an Education Policy Committee (EPC) resolution to alter the qualifications for the Dean's List, allowing students taking year-long classes, seniors writing honors theses, and those whose drop forms were not processed by the University to remain eligible for the academic honor.
Past policy prevented students with a 'Y' or 'NG' grade from appearing on the Dean's List. Students receive a NG ("no grade") notation when a drop form is not completed, or is misplaced by the University, but a professor chooses not to give the student a failing grade for having missed the semester.
Students are assigned a Y after completing the first semester of a year-long course or thesis project. The Y is replaced by a final grade at the end of the academic year. Before the rule change, a Y or NG eliminated a student from consideration for the Dean's List. It was up to students to prove to the Registrar that the NG was erroneous. Those with a Y on their transcript were forced to wait for their final grade and be placed retroactively on the fall Dean's List.
Under the new rules, students who fulfil the Dean's List requirements, including a 3.4 or higher GPA for members of the College of Liberal Arts, will be placed on the Dean's List despite the Y or NG on their transcript. The Registrar will later review the cases to see if the NG course was in fact dropped, and to ensure that the Y later became a high enough grade to maintain the student's GPA.
If, after the Registrar's review, the student does not qualify for the Dean's List - either because the NG on the transcript was legitimate or because the final grade in the year-long course sufficiently lowered their GPA - the Registrar will revoke the honor.
Before the changes, Dean of Colleges Charles Inouye said, some of the University's most ambitious students were not recognized for their accomplishments.
Dean's List criteria requires Liberal Arts students to achieve a GPA at or above 3.4 and engineering students to earn GPA equal to or greater than a 3.2. Students must have completed a minimum of four credits with at least three of the classes for letter grades to be eligible.
Administrators hope the new policy will apply to the fall 2001 transcripts, although physics professor and EPC Co-Chair Roger Tobin said he is not sure how Tufts will implement the new policy. "I would hope that ultimately it would be automated but I don't know if that can be done immediately," he said.
Dean of Academic Services Jeanne Dillon, who administers SIS Online, said she does not know when the change will take place.
The EPC decided to evaluate the policy when Associate Professor Jim Schmolze of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department raised questions as to its fairness. Schmolze began teaching a year-long course this semester and realized that the first semester Ys he would give students would remove them from the Dean's List. Students who take a year-long course should not be penalized by being forced to wait a semester before receiving honors for their coursework, he said.
"I know that a lot of seniors who write theses get a Y for their first semester of thesis writing," he said. The change is "good news for the students because now they can be on the Dean's List if they are taking a senior honors thesis course or a course that lasts a whole year."
Inouye and Schmolze brought the issue before the EPC, whose administrative, faculty, and student members concluded that the policy was unfair and conferred with the class deans before presenting the faculty with a recommendation to remove the restrictions.
According to Dillon, faculty members were overwhelmingly in favor of the change. "I think [the adjustment] just makes a lot of sense," said Tobin, the EPC co-chair. "I think most faculty were very surprised to find out that the Y disqualified students."
Although the faculty also voted to ignore NGs as well, pending the Registrar's review, Tobin said that motion attracted more controversy because of the inconsistent application of NGs among professors. Faculty do not always use NGs according to University policy, Tobin said.
According to Inouye, a student who stops attending a class or does not complete the required coursework deserves an F, not a NG, unless he or she has followed the necessary procedures to drop or withdraw from the class.
An "incomplete" grade will still preclude a student from appearing on the Dean's List until the required coursework is completed.
