Background:  The College of Letters & Sciences delegates to the Office of Degree Audit & Diploma Services the responsibility to audit student records for degree completion and to determine students’ eligibility to graduate.  L&S provides a degree audit (DARS) for this purpose.  Many students receive exceptions to their degree requirements; they are processed by L&S as DARS exceptions. Some curriculum exceptions would impact a student’s eligibility to graduate.

Guiding Principles:  The L&S curriculum is a context for student learning.  Approved exceptions within the curriculum are an acknowledgement that the student achieved the desired learning outcomes.  

There are two main types of exceptions:  course substitutions and requirement modifications.  A course substitution acknowledges the student met the learning objectives with an alternate course, and thus effective at the completion of that course.  A requirement modification is essentially a customization to the student's program, and thus effective when the student entered the program.  

Because all L&S degrees and majors carry a quality of work requirement, all undergraduate course work may impact the student's GPA.  Therefore, a student may not earn a degree prior to the term in which the last undergraduate course is completed.

A change to a student’s program of study (e.g., declaration/cancellation of a major) is processed in ISIS and thus is not covered by this policy, which focuses exclusively on exceptions to requirements within a student’s program and processed in DARS.

Policy:  The guiding principles provide sufficient guidance that L&S will not provide effective dates for every exception processed in DARS.  For purposes of determining eligibility to graduate, an L&S DARS exception that does not carry an effective date is assumed to be effective as follows:

• A course being applied to a requirement – in the term of the course being applied
• An adjustment to L&S requirement – in the term the student entered the L&S degree (in DARS, the Catalog Year)
• An adjustment to L&S major or certificate requirement – in the term the major/certificate was declared (in DARS, the Altyr1)

A student is not eligible to graduate earlier than his/her last enrolled term as an L&S undergraduate. 

The L&S AIM or Academic Deans office may exercise discretion to adjust effective dates of exceptions when appropriate.  Contact Mike Pflieger in L&S for more information.