Christine Kline
Academic Standards Committee
Final Report for the 2006-2007 Academic Year
Petitions
A subcommittee of the Academic Standards Committee met regularly to hear and to act
on student petitions for waivers of academic policies. As of the April 6 ASC meeting, the
subcommittee had acted on 201 petitions. As authorized by the committee, a petition
review team met to handle approvals of routine petitions.
Hearing Boards
One hearing board was convened to consider a grade complaint.
Policy Language for Repeat of a First-Year Seminar
The committee addressed the unique need that obtains for course repeats for first-year
seminars. Unlike most course repeats, which must be undertaken with the same course
and course number, first-year seminars may not be scheduled in the term or terms
following. The committee adopted an addition to the policy on re-registration of the same
course to enable a student to take another course under the rubric of Writing and Rhetoric
or Scholarly and Creative Inquiry.
Academic Honesty in a Digital Age
Noting the need to review and update policy language respecting plagiarism in the
handbook to address the use of the internet, a subcommittee was appointed to review
concepts of academic honesty in this digital age and to make recommendations for policy
updates. The committee, in preparation for the subcommittee work and in response to the
subcommittee progress reports of the work, engaged in lengthy and energetic discussions
about a range of plagiarism issues across the disciplines, the nature of intellectual
ownership and authorship, appropriate citation in a digital age, and the responsibilities of
students and faculty in an academic community across the academic experiences at UPS.
The subcommittee will submit their formal recommendation at the April 20th meeting.
Review of Withdrawal Grade Policy
The committee has undertaken a periodic review of the withdrawal grade policy over the
course of the first-year implementation. The policy revision, approved in 2005-2006,
extends the period of withdrawal with an automatic W through the sixth week of classes
and now has a deadline at the end of the twelfth week of classes beyond which a faculty
member cannot assign a W. A W can be assigned during those interim weeks if
conditions, outlined in the current policy, hold. The members of the committee agree that
a review of the effectiveness of the change should continue. In this first year of
implementation, no major questions have arisen about its efficacy; the registrar is
gathering information on how overall grading patterns and withdrawal patterns are
affected by this policy.
Study Abroad Record Keeping
The committee discussed the disposition of a proposal made by the Interim Study
Committee on Study Abroad in the spring of 2006 to include coursework taken by
students on “partner” or “affiliated” study abroad programs be recorded on Puget Sound
transcripts. The committee approved an adaptation of the Puget Sound transcript which
will retain a study abroad notation (including units taken) at the top of the transcript, but
will add also a course-by-course listing of the coursework taken abroad, together with
credit totass by course, inserted chronologically into the transcript record.