It’s time to complete your last fall’s incompletes and to assign incompletes to this fall’s uncompleted. If you read that sentence a few times the word ‘complete’ starts to sound totally nonsensical. It makes me wonder if the rest of this article will make any sense at all. I’ll give it a try although I really should be sending out my Christmas cards and not chatting about incomplete grades. Apparently the college does NOT pay you to do the former so I’ll default to doing the latter… less enthusiastically, of course.
Here’s how the incomplete process is supposed to work:
A student is unable to finish the course work in time for you to assign a regular grade by December 24th (I’ll be sneaking that deadline date in my articles a lot). You don’t want to leave the grade blank because you know that we will harass you mercilessly until we have something in that grade field so, to protect yourself, you decide to assign an incomplete grade. Now, a few things need to take place in conjunction with the assignment of an “I”. The most important is the Incomplete Grade Contract, available in your department. This is an agreement between you and the student stating what they need to do to complete the course and what their grade will be if they do not complete the course, aka the ‘alternate grade’. This contract is kept in your department (Please don’t send it to R&R. We may throw it into a Christmas card and send it to Michigan.)
While the college allows a full year to complete the course before asking for the alternate grade, you do NOT have to allow a full year. You and the student may agree that one month is enough time to complete the work. This date is indicated on the contract.
At the end of a full year R&R will ask for the grade. At this point you may give us either the alternate grade, if the student didn’t complete any work, or a different grade if the student completed the work or did part of the work. The grade is determined by the professor and submitted on an Academic Change Form, aka grade change form. Like all grade change forms, it needs to be signed by the department Chair.
One common misconception is that R&R will automatically change the grade to an “F” at the end of one year. This does NOT happen. We also will not automatically change the grade to the alternate grade at the end of the year. We don’t even know what the alternate grade is because it is either in your department or in Michigan. The “I” will stay on the student’s record until we get a grade change form from you.
Another misconception is that the student needs to re-register and pay for the course in order to earn the final grade. The opposite is true. No student should register and pay for the course again. If they have so much work to do that they have to take the entire course again, an incomplete grade is NOT the way to go. Incomplete means that you need to finish a paper or take a test, not that you need to retake the entire course.
Incomplete grade changes for fall 2006 are due at the same time as the fall 2007 grades---December 24th at noon. We will be running grade reports for both fall 2006 (updated) and fall 2007 right after the 12/24 noon deadline. We can all wake up on Christmas morning with the knowledge that fall grades are all safely in the system and all we need to worry about now are spring rooms!
Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
12/18/2007 |