Today, the Robert Holland Faculty Senate will vote on resolutions from the Student Association requesting a fall break and an academic forgiveness policy.
Currently, the University of Mississippi, Delta State University, Jackson State University and the University of Southern Mississippi have fall breaks; Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University do not. Surprisingly, Mississippi State University has yet to implement a fall break, despite the trend set by Mississippi’s other major universities and requests from students and faculty.
Much of the controversy around this issue stems from the loss of student-teacher contact. The fall break would remove 100 contact minutes from the tentative Fall 2003 and Spring 2004 schedules. Teachers would have to either eliminate course content or squeeze it into fewer class meetings-neither of which would benefit students.
Another problem with the fall break is that it would not affect all faculty equally. Nine-month faculty would be off Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but 12-month faculty, because of their contracts, would still have to work. So, essentially this break gives nine-month faculty free holiday time that is unavailable to 12-month faculty.
But the SA asks the Faculty Senate to grant a fall break for Fall 2003 as a trial, and next year, they would bring the issue up again. So even if we get a break this year, it still may not be officially established.
The Faculty Senate also decides today whether to consider a policy of academic forgiveness. Old university policy allowed students who failed a class to retake that class, and the new grade would simply replace the old grade. Later, MSU adopted the “superdrop” policy, which was a one-time deal that allowed students to drop a class until the exam date, and their transcripts would not indicate the drop at all.
MSU maintains policies of academic amnesty, which allows students to have failing grades removed from their transcripts and the classes not applied toward graduation requirements. MSU also has an academic “fresh start” policy, which allows students who have been out of any college or university for 24 months to have a clean slate. But after the superdrop policy flopped, the university did not implement any academic forgiveness policy.
The SA resolution calls for MSU to establish a policy and suggests that students be allowed one opportunity to retake up to two classes on the MSU main campus and replace a D or and F; the old grade would be recorded as an R, and the new grade would replace the old grade; and the retaken hours would not apply to the 12-hour minimum requirement to be a full-time student.
While students seem to be mostly in favor of academic forgiveness, much of the faculty disagree. Regardless, the Faculty Senate should consider implementing a blanket academic forgiveness policy that would allow students to make up for a limited number of “mistakes,” despite whatever circumstances surround failure.
We’ll find out today whether the Faculty Senate will comply with or turn a deaf ear to the students’ wishes.