The University adopted a new non-participation policy this fall, targeted towards students who do not participate in a course in which they are enrolled.
“While the University of Rochester is not an attendance taking institution, it is expected that students engage in their courses throughout the entirety of the semester,” the Office of Academic Affairs said in a press release.
Kris Condello, Associate Director of Academic Affairs, said that “engagement” can mean a variety of things, including attendance, discussion participation, and completing assignments.
Condello explained that by codifying what participation is, the University is now able to “identify early when a student never participated or stopped participating, [and] prevent students from passively remaining enrolled in courses they’re not attending or engaging with.”
The University expects that the new policy will alert students early in the semester if their participation does not meet the standards of one or more of their professors. Condello said she hopes this will allow students to manage their course load before they need to go to additional measures to change their schedule.
This new change in policy also aims to help avoid simple mistakes that might have a detrimental impact on a student’s transcript.
“Perhaps the student doesn’t know how to drop or didn’t realize their drop was not processed,” Condello said. “Identifying this early will reduce the steps a student needs to take later to correct their registration.”
Prior to this policy’s implementation, many professors tracked at least some level of student engagement in their classes but there was no standardized mechanism for early alert of non-participation.
Instructors would typically assign low- or no-participation students an “N” or “no-grade” instead of a traditional letter grade.
“The use of the N grade was inconsistent, uninformative, difficult to manage, and reported too late. It did not provide triggers for outreach and resulted in reactive action as opposed to proactive action,” Condello said.
The current policy now is that the University will try to open a dialogue with the student who is not engaging in the course, but if the student does not respond by the end of the semester, it will be marked as an “ENP” (the student never participated) or “ESP” (the student stopped participating). The presence of either of these terms equates to a failure on the student’s transcript.
Moving forward, the school hopes to take a more preemptive role when it comes to helping students navigate academics.
