Oakland University Senate

Third meeting
Thursday, 10 November 1988
Oakland Center, Gold Room B
3:10 p.m.

AGENDA

Respectfully submitted by Keith R. Kleckner for the Steering Committee.

A. Old Business
        None

B.  New Business

I . Motion from the Academic Standing and Honors Committee to revise policies on probation and dismissal (Mr. Dahlgren):

MOVED that the following probation and dismissal policy be adopted to apply to all undergraduate, second degree, and post-baccalaureate students at Oakland University, effective Fall 1990.

PROBATION AND DISMISSAL POLICY
1.   Students with a cumulative GPA of 2.00 or above or without an established cumulative GPA are considered to be in good academic standing. See 4. below.
2.  Students in good academic standing will be placed on probation at the end of a semester when their cumulative GPA is below 2.00. They will be allowed to remain at Oakland University on probationary status for at least one semester.
3.  At the end of a probationary semester, students will be:

a. returned to good academic standing if their cumulative GPA is 2.00 or higher,
b. dismissed from the University if their cumulative GPA is below the minimum required GPA based on the total number of Oakland University and transfer credits earned (see the table below), or
c. continued on probation if a. and b. do not apply. For example, if at the end of a probationary semester, a student has accumulated 46 credits and has a cumulative GPA of 1.77, then that student will be allowed to remain at Oakland University on probation.

OU and Transfer Credit Earned	Minimum Required GPA
0-16	1.49
17-32	1.61
33-48	1.73
49-64	1.85
65-80	1.97
81+	2.00

4.  In order to establish a cumulative GPA a student must receive a numerical grade in at least one course at Oakland University, and in the computation of the cumulative GPA, only those courses at Oakland University for which a student has received numerical grades are used. If a course has been repeated, the assigned credits for the course are only counted once in the total number of credits attempted and only the most recent numerical grade received is used. The "Honor Points" for each course are computed by multiplying the numerical grade received by the number of credits assigned to the course. The cumulative GPA is determined by dividing the sum of the Honor Points for all courses receiving numerical grades by the total number of credits attempted in courses receiving numerical grades at Oakland University.

First Reading: Debatable, amendable, but not eligible for final vote at this meeting.

Comment: The Academic Standing and Honors Committee offers this policy statement as a replacement for the three separate probation and dismissal policies currently in operation. The attached Rationale statement articulates the committee's thinking. This proposal comes to the Senate with the approval of the University Committee on Undergraduate Instruction.

C.  Good and Welfare
         Private Resolutions

D.  Information Items
        1.  Report from the Campus Development and Environment Committee on the revised campus master plan. The campus master plan, developed by the firm of Johnson Johnson, and Roy, has recently been reconsidered by the same firm, which has recently presented a draft report. The report was studied by the Campus Development and Environment Committee and has received a strong endorsement by the Committee.

Invited by the Steering Committee, that committee (chaired this year by Professor Richard Tucker) will present information about the revised plan to the Senate and any other interested persons who wish to participate in this open forum on a matter of general interest.

        2. Construction Update (buildings and roads)

RATIONALE on Probation and Dismissal Policy proposal

Currently, the University is functioning with three separate probation and dismissal policies: one for students entering prior  to Fall, 1976; one for students entering between Fall, 1976, and Summer, 1984; and one for students entering Fall, 1984, and later. The first and third policies are based on the cumulative GPA where the first policy, carries extra stipulations on N/WN grades, and the second is based on the API (Academic Progress Indicator)  with fairly complex rules governing whether N/WN grades are counted. If a student has accumulated 80 or fewer credits toward graduation, the minimum required GPA/API/GPA (in the respective policies) is given by the formula

1.4 + 0.6E/(80-T)

where T is the total number of transfer credits and E is the total number of credits earned at Oakland University. If a student has accumulated more than 80 credits, the minimum required GPA is 2.00.

The Academic Standing, and Honors Committee seeks to unify these policies by applying the proposed policy to all students effective Fall, 1990, and to simplify the policy by removing consideration for transfer credit, by removing the complexities in the first and second policies involving N/WAN grades, and by transforming the formula into the discrete table provided earlier. The minimum required GPA's in the table were taken to be the third quartiles of the minimum required GPA's from the formula for the specified credit intervals. This constitutes a modest strengthening of the dismissal policy. See the discussion of the data below.

The proposed policy will solve or at least mollify a number of problems arising from the present policies. Many of the growing group of students who reenter the University for post baccalaureate work or second degrees are confused as to which policy applies to them; this is exacerbated by the fact that the probation and dismissal policy does not follow the 6-year catalog ruling. Furthermore, there has been considerable difficulty understanding the rules governing N/WN grades in the first and second policies. To illustrate some of the complexity in the second policy, if a student receives N grades in four different four credit courses and repeats one of them with a passing numerical grade, then all four N grades will no longer affect the API. Even  some faculty advisors have had difficulty understanding these policies and explaining them to students.

A problem stemming from the formula is that a student on probation must recalculate the minimum required GPA for every change of credit (that is, selection of courses and adding and dropping courses) during a semester. Moreover, since there is a delay in evaluating transcripts (usually less -than one semester but considerably longer at times in the past) the value of T in the formula can be temporarily unknown. Although the proposed policy does not eliminate these nuisances, the discrete table lessens their effect.

The first and second policies consume a good deal of time and energy in the Office of Academic Services that could better be directed.   For example, the office must hand calculate the API's in the case of grade changes and GPA's for :readmission of students from long ago to provide, a timely determination of whether a student is on probation. The cost here is considerable and a unification of policies would eliminate this work. The situation will become worse. Since the new Student Records System Software is not equipped to accommodate the API and modifying it to do so would be prohibitively expensive, all API's will eventually be hand calculated.

DATA

To study the effect of the proposed policy against the existing policies, a census was taken of those students whose cumulative GPA's were less than 2.00 at the end of Fall, 1987. Of the 362 students in the census, 128 were dismissed by the current policies and 139 would have been dismissed by the proposed policy. This constitutes an 8.6% increase in the number of dismissals. Twelve students who were not dismissed by the current policies would have been dismissed by the proposed policy, and one student who was dismissed by the current policies would not have been dismissed by than proposed policy. Of the twelve, one would be dismissed due to replacing the API  by the GPA, four would  be due to replacing the formula by the table, and seven would be dismissed due to removal of consideration for transfer credit. In order to study the same population for the comparisons the census did not include students on probation due to the number of N/WN grades and low API's.  Thus the net increase in dismissals due to the proposed policy may be lower than that reported above.