At its last meeting, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee adopted a new set of academic standards for UB students regarding academic probation. These revisions come only three years after the last revision of undergraduate guidelines and tighten course-load completion requirements while loosening standards for timely progress as it relates to total number of credits.
The new guidelines are supposed to make the policy easier to understand for students, according to William Baumer, chairman of the Grading Committee. While making any policy simpler for students to grasp is a step in the positive direction, stability in standards and insuring access to and frequency of advisement are just as important.
The redefinition of the probation criteria means that if a student acquires 60 credits and has not yet declared a major, they will no longer have academic probation automatically dangling over their head, as was the policy under the old standards. There are students in good academic standing that may not have decided on a specific program or may not have known about the probation standard. In light of these scenarios, this is a realistic adjustment to the criteria, as good students should not be penalized with academic probation for indecision or lack of information.
Naturally, this means students who would have received notification of untimely progress will now have to realize for themselves when they are jeopardizing their academic future. Students who get behind academically or simply forget to apply for their major may unintentionally jeopardize their ability to complete a four-year education in four years. While it is not the university's responsibility to baby-sit its students, some responsibility does rest with the school.
This leaves two options for the university in aiding students to select a major in a timely manner. The first is asking academic advisors to become more proactive in reaching students with information on the academic avenues available to them. The second is to notify a student via E-mail or letter of the major(s) they could qualify for upon their completion of 60 credits. Either option affords the student the opportunity to make an educated choice about their future in an academic program.
The second major alteration passed by the FSEC is to mandate that students complete 24 credits in an academic year to avoid probation - instead of the 75 percent of attempted credits rule that had previously been the standard. This makes the system easier to understand for students, but again the impetus rests on advisors and the administration to make these rules clear for students.
Even though the FSEC's new criteria are designed to be student-friendly, the regulations themselves only go halfway. The standards and the instances of application must be made clear to those to whom they apply. Allowing this policy to stand for the foreseeable future -until they become generally accepted guidelines - and actively educating students of when they could potentially be placed on academic probation - could solve this dilemma.
For practical reasons, these rules are positive steps for UB's academic standards, but steps like these require additional action to make them work. Students have to be aware of the policies and how they can affect them. The university may relax its stance on what constitutes a probation-worthy student action (or inaction), but it must still make strides to keep students abreast of their current
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
