Pre-pandemic P/NC policy returns for Arch

A system-wide announcement posted to Rensselaer’s LMS site on Friday by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Michael Hanna said the Institute is going back to “the normal rules” of the pass/no credit policy for the Summer semester.

In the message, Hanna said, “We are all more experienced in how to manage online academics.”

According to Hanna, the deadlines for filing P/NC forms for a course have been moved to the day before the course’s final exam as a way to ease “back to greater normality in the use of P/NC.” This date is July 9 for Summer Term II and August 20 for Summer Term 1 and Summer Term III, as specified by RPI’s academic calendar.

During the Spring semester, students could P/NC any number of courses—including those listed by name as graduation requirements—due to the move to online education. The deadline to fill out P/NC forms was extended to May 15, allowing students to know their final grades before deciding to P/NC the course.

In a letter to the editor published April 22, former Grand Marshal Megan Lettko ’20 and former Vice-Grand Marshal Advaith Narayan ’21 wrote how Vice Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Education Keith Moo-Young said in a meeting that the special P/NC policy will not continue into Arch as “professors have enough time to adjust curriculum, and the Institute wants to ‘maintain the quality of the degree.’”

In an email to Lettko and Narayan sent shortly after the publication of their piece, Moo-Young said there was on-going discussion about allowing the Spring semester’s special P/NC policy to apply to some but not all courses during the Summer semester.

The current P/NC policy can be found in the Institute’s catalog. Students are permitted to apply the P/NC designation to a maximum of four courses during their undergraduate education.

These four courses can include any combination of free electives, up to two courses in the science core unless required by name, or up to two courses of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences core that are not part of a student’s depth requirement or being used to meet the communicative intensive requirement.

Students cannot P/NC any courses required by name for their major, any courses for a minor, or any 6000 level courses.