Dear faculty and staff,
We are writing to provide insight and guidance on Incomplete (INC) grades and the appropriate times to use them. The Committee on Examinations and Standing (EX&S) regularly receives petitions from undergraduate students who initially received one or more grades of INC from their professors in a preceding semester. While assigning INC in many circumstances may seem to assist the student in a difficult time, granting them is often a serious disservice. It is therefore only appropriate to give INC in certain instances.
To provide context for these recommendations, it is helpful to lay out an often-occurring scenario. Too often, the student contacts the professor at the beginning of the first week of the new semester with no work completed, leaving the professor little time to assess completed work and submit grades by the deadline. This also leaves little time for the student to petition EX&S for an INC extension, as the committee does not meet until the second week of a new semester. By that time, many of these students invariably receive one or more failing grades (F) for failure to complete the work after the INC grade conversion deadline passes.
Quite often, when INCs convert to F grades, students receive a notice of academic suspension after the new semester has begun. These students subsequently must abruptly withdraw from their current coursework, move out of their campus housing, resign from campus jobs and positions of leadership, and, at times, return home a long distance away. Upon investigation, the committee frequently discovers that many INCs were inappropriate for the student’s circumstances.
No matter how much sympathy you may feel for a student’s circumstances, you may do them a serious disservice by granting an INC. Verified illness or other circumstances beyond the student's control do not, in and of themselves, justify an INC. Assumptions should not be made about the student’s future capacity to complete missing work. In most cases, faculty should assign the grade earned, with INC being used only as a last resort.
INCs should not be granted in the following examples:
- If you have not talked with the student and mutually agreed upon a grade of INC and a timeline for completing and submitting the missing work.
- If it is unrealistic for the student to submit the missing work in the designated time period (e.g., the course requires the student's presence in class due to course policy, required laboratory work, or group work).
- If the undergraduate student is petitioning EX&S to drop the course. Assumptions should not be made about the completion or outcome of any EX&S petition. Students are advised to continue attending and participating in the course until they receive a decision on their late-drop petition.
If the student has completed all other work in the course except for the final exam. In this case, the appropriate action is to assign a grade of Other (OT). The deadline for converting a fall or spring semester’s OT grade into a letter grade is earlier than the deadline for converting an INC into a letter grade.
Should you decide that granting a requested INC is appropriate, clearly outline a schedule for the student to complete the missing work and ensure that it is received and reviewed well before the deadline for submission of a grade (the end of the second week of the new semester). Additionally, establish a deadline for the student to notify you if they cannot complete the missing work in the agreed-upon timeframe and may need to request an extension, well before the start of the new semester.
You can read the official language regarding Faculty Grading Guidelines and Grades in the General Announcements. Thank you for all of your hard work.
Warm regards,
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Amy Dittmar
Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman
Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Seiichi Matsuda
Associate Teaching Professor and Chair of EX&S Robert Beaird