The Committee on Examinations and Standing is charged with interpreting and enforcing the academic regulations of the university while approving exceptions to them as circumstances warrant. The advice and requests that follow are based on the Committee's experience with student petitions. Although it is the responsibility of the students to become familiar with the regulations and conform to them, the faculty can help them do so. Moreover, the faculty also has responsibility for understanding these regulations and for not putting the students in conflict with them. We urge all faculty members to become familiar with the academic regulations and grading guidelines as they are stated in the General Announcements.

Advice. Several times in recent years students have had to petition the Committee because they depended on bad faculty advice. Please don't make a student pay for your ignorance. If you don't know the answer to a student's question, it is perfectly acceptable to say, "I'm not sure what the current policy is. Let's look it up." Another good answer is to recommend that a student check with another faculty or staff member who has direct responsibility for particular decisions. The department chair may be the best person to answer a student question.

Dropping Courses. Students are not automatically dropped from a course if they do not attend class. The only way a student may drop a course is to go to the Registrar's Office, pick up a drop/add form, obtain the appropriate signatures, and submit the form to the Registrar's office. The student should be strongly advised to keep his copy of the form in a safe place. Faculty are urged to remind students of the deadlines for dropping courses, and to return to the students some graded work so that they will have some idea of their standing before that deadline (the tenth week of classes). Although it is the students' responsibility to keep up with deadlines and regulations, if a student who has not been attending appears on a class list before the drop deadline, it would be a kindness to phone or e-mail the student and inform him that he is still enrolled.

Distribution Courses. Only those courses so marked in the General Announcements or in official class lists will serve for distribution. Several times in recent years faculty members have incorrectly advised students that a course not on the list would fulfill distribution requirements. The Committee on Examinations and Standing does not approve petitions for substituting another course for a distribution course. If you think a course should be listed as a distribution course, please talk to your department chair.

Grades. One of our general principles is that an individual student should not have a special advantage or opportunity not available to others. So please do not be too free with extensions of deadlines or incompletes unless there are circumstances beyond a student's control that prevent work from being completed. It would be advisable to be explicit about your own course requirements and your basis for grading by spelling them out in a syllabus distributed during the first week of class.

A final word: please apply Rice regulations, not those of your former institution. However, if your former institution deals with a problem or regulation better than Rice, we would like to know about it.

The Committee on Examinations and Standing can be reached through the Office of Student Affairs. The following people will be happy to try to answer your questions: Linda Cooper, Assistant to the Vice President, x4997, lcooper@rice.edu; Mark Scheid, Assistant Vice President and Director of Academic Advising, x4060, mss@rice.edu; and Ed Billups, Chair, x5694, billups@rice.edu. The Student Affairs webpage has information concerning the Committee: see http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~vpsa.


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