On Tuesday, March 5, the College’s faculty voted to remove the requirement for seniors to take a course in their concentrations each semester of their final year and discussed the credit/no-credit policy in-depth.
Previously, seniors were required to take at least one course each semester of their final year in their concentrations. However, faculty voted down the “expectation” language and instead voted to remove the sentence with the requirement from the College Catalogue in its entirety.
Tara McKee, Associate Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of Students for Academics, who also serves as the Chair of the Committee on Academic Standing, spearheaded many of the changes.
McKee explained the rationale behind the change, saying, “The current language stated that ‘Seniors must take at least one course each semester in their concentrations unless granted an exemption by the department or program chair,’ and nearly all department or program chairs were granting seniors exemptions.” In addition, McKee pointed out that “the only way for the registrar to enforce the current policy is by hand.”
Given that the policy had a flawed enforcement policy and was oftentimes overridden, faculty decided it was best to simply remove the requirement. This will allow seniors who have completed their concentrations to branch out and take other courses if desired.
Furthermore, faculty took part in a Committee of the Whole to discuss the credit/no credit policy. More specifically, faculty discussed pros and cons of the restriction that says students are not allowed to use the credit/no credit policy within their first semester at Hamilton. They also discussed the stipulation that a student cannot withdraw the credit/no credit option once it has been elected.
In order to have a constructive conversation on this topic, the Committee gathered information from Hamilton’s peer schools about their credit/no credit policies. Currently, Hamilton’s policy states that students must declare a class pass/fail by the fourth Friday of the Fall Semester and third Friday of Spring Semester, cannot remove the pass/fail distinction once elected, cannot use it in the first semester, and can declare it on a maximum of four courses.
According to McKee, the motion to discuss the credit/no credit policy came about for two reasons. The first reason was the number of petitions the committee received from students to elect a course credit/no credit after the deadline passed. The second reason is that the Committee on Academic Standing is currently working through the College Catalogue and doing a general review of the language to ensure faculty still agree on all the policies.
Connecticut College and Washington & Lee University have similar policies to Hamilton in that first-year students are not allowed to take a class pass/fail. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Swarthmore College, where all grades for the first semester are credit/no credit.
Potentially changing the credit/no credit policy is motivated by various rationales, but centers around the potentially difficult transition from high school to college. The academic workload may be different to what students are used to in high school, and allowing first-years to choose the credit/no credit option on a course can help ease the transition into a more strenuous workload.
First-year student Jay Menner ’22 says, “Last semester I was in a course where I wasn’t doing as well as I’d liked and instead of being able to use the credit/no credit policy, I had to completely drop the course.”
Allowing students to take courses as credit/no-credit in their first semester will give first-years like Menner the ability to take those harder courses without worrying about their grades. Several seniors reported that their GPA in their first semester at Hamilton ended up being their worst GPA in all four years of college.
Although no changes have been made to the credit/no credit policy quite yet, McKee agreed that there was some support for a revision in this policy. There were also faculty who wanted to move the deadline for declaring credit/no credit later in the semester. However, the Committee on Academic Standing will need to work closely with the Academic Council — the committee in charge of the College calendar — if they want to implement such a change.
