At the June 9 Board of Trustees meeting, the Academic Amnesty policy was unanimously approved, enabling graduate students at the University of North Alabama to begin a new academic record for their graduate studies.
In a student’s time at a university, major life events might get in the way of the student’s studies, which can have negative effects on their academic record and can harm their chances to continue their studies in the future. The Academic Amnesty policy seeks to offer a solution by forgiving graduate students’ detrimental grades after being absent from their studies for an amount of time.
“While undergraduate students have the Second Chance Provision that enables students to remove grades of D, F and WF after sitting out a period of time, there was no similar policy for graduate students,” said Dr. Laura Williams, who worked on the policy. “Faculty identified the need for a graduate amnesty policy because students are sometimes unsuccessful in graduate school due to circumstances in their lives. If the student earns poor grades, it can affect the student’s ability to ever return to graduate school because they may not meet the admission GPA requirements, which are more stringent than undergraduate admission requirements.”
When a student is granted Academic Amnesty, all earlier credits and grades which were earned at UNA as a graduate student will be considered ‘forgiven’ and will not be recognized or used in academic status determinations, such as admissions, or calculations of grade point average for the student. However, only grades earned at UNA count toward Academic Amnesty, and all prior credits and grades continue to be shown on the student’s permanent academic record.
If a student wishes to apply for Academic Amnesty and return to the same graduate program, they must wait three years before reapplying. If the student plans to apply to a different graduate program, they are eligible to apply any time after withdrawing from their original graduate program.
Amnesty can only be granted once in a student’s academic career and cannot be rescinded after it is granted. The policy is only applied once the student has earned a B or higher in the first nine hours of their graduate program that they complete after returning.
With the new Academic Amnesty policy, the university hopes to offer a second chance to students who would otherwise be unable to return to their program of study due to major life events, which will aid generations of graduate students to come. Academic amnesty offered to graduate students
