New Faculty Grading Policy
In May the Faculty Senate changed the Faculty Policy II-105, Summary Period for Academic Semester. The amended policy now reflects that all grades are due 72-hours after the last day of the summary exam period, regardless of whether a two-hour summary block exam was held. Exceptions may be made for faculty who have scheduled exams in the last three days of the exam period (December 16 -18).
This change only affects the associated grading deadline and has not changed the overall grading policy. This permanent change to the deadline is unrelated to other instructional changes due to COVID-19.
A process has been put in place to allow instructors that have exams on the last three dates in the final exam week to reach out to the RO and request an extension of an additional 72-hours to the grading deadline. Instructors are sent a qualtrics form from the RO to gain information about the extension request. Once the form is completed, the Student Services staff verifies that the course is eligible for the extension and then adds an approved exception indicator to the course. To support the shift to a primary deadline and an extended grade deadline, Leslie Gardner modified the technical infrastructure of the grade post process to enable it to be run twice, ensuring that instructors with the extended grading deadline are not locked out of their grade rosters prematurely. Effective with the Fall 2020 term, Student Services will run the grade post process on the primary deadline (December 21, 2020) and again after the 72-hour extension has passed (December 24, 2020).
As of December 8, 2020, grading extensions have been approved for 476 graded sections of 34 Fall 2020 courses, meaning 7,516 students will not have their grades posted until December 24, 2020.
To ensure that as many grades as possible are posted, Student Services will wait until both deadlines have passed to run academic standing actions, currently set for December 28, 2020.
The RO worked with the Secretary of the Faculty to provide extensive communication to instructors, department chairs, and academic dean’s offices regarding this change.