<p>My S was short 6 units. His advisor went over his transcripts and noticed he had taken 2 dual enrollment classed in HS and they used those. In addition he walked at graduation and had to take 1 summer school class.
His GF was able to do make up some units via individual courses on topics that her advisor came up with. A combination of independent work and one on one meetings with the advisor who happened to be her department chair. </p>
<p>When you check back over requirements, be sure you are looking at correct ones. Programs change and usually the student is bound to the requirements that they started under. With a major change, he needs to be sure he is looking at correct set of classes needed. D’s school changed the way they did gen ed requirements when she was sophomore. Some friends moved to new system but she stuck with her original program of study requirements since for her major it would have required two more gen ed classes. Sadly if you read details in student handbook, students are responsible for taking correct courses, regardless of advisement. Luckily for us, school does major check at end of junior year and first semester senior to help avoid this.</p>
<p>Agree with mom60 - maybe he has AP credit he didn’t use cause it seem like a duplication that he could use now. Plus head of department usually can change what a class counts for. D’s advisor is also department head and signed off on a philosophy course counting as religion as well as a study abroad class that was technically literature - someone ought to be able to sign off on something similar. </p>
<p>It may not work at every school, but at D’s school it is ultimately the department head that signs off and says you have fulfilled your major, regardless of some computer system. Appeal to him/her. Good luck.</p>
<p>scmom12 has a good point. Check the catalogues that have been in effect while he has been enrolled. He may have the option to choose which catalogue he graduates under, and thus may have some more options for the credit count.</p>
<p>Happykid’s guaranteed transfer didn’t transfer quite as expected from her CC to her U. After several months of maternal pushing, she walked into the registrar’s office with my notes from my reading of the catalogue, and sho-nuff, there was a manual adjustment that hadn’t been made correctly. </p>
This post is a little old, but I thought people might want to know how it all turned out for us. We appreciate all the comments and did use some of them to negotiate with the college.
It turned out that the shortfall was even worse than we initially thought; he was actually short on one gen ed class and had missed a junior requirement as well. The college agreed to waive the one gen ed. Unfortunately he has to take the junior class this spring and really did not want to take 20 hours since he has to prepare for his senior recital in March and continue to work part time, so he will have to take one more class in the summer to graduate. It’s a lab science class and they will not let him take that at a CC or online. The college has an August commencement and he will do that. The really sad part of it is that he will probably miss his sister’s high school graduation because it is midweek after his summer class starts. And we don’t know how we will deal with housing since his lease is up in May and both roommates are graduating then.
There should be plenty of vacancies in the summer in a college area.
I would not so quickly rule out him taking 24 hours in the Spring. Since he only needs general elective hours, he could add a lower level survey type course (some schools even allow these to be taken pass/fail) or an independent study course in an area of interest. Add in an hour or two of golf, tennis, weightlifting, etc, and he’s got his 6 hours.
As another suggested. Just take the humanities CLEP exam. A music major should have no trouble with it. It costs 80 bucks and he’d be done in an hour. Many colleges give six credits for this test.
Does he really need to work this term? I would think that it would be cheaper to not work and take the 20 credits now rather than pay for housing for the summer.
I have also discovered we needed to keep track of my son’s progress towards graduation. At his last meeting with his advisor, she said he had completed only 84 of 120 credits and needed to take Calculus I since the university didn’t show he’d gotten credit for it. She told him he could take it over the summer, and he said that would be fine. When he told me this, I about exploded! He’s a senior majoring in math! He got a 5 on the AP test.
I went online and saw that the university LISTED the AP result (and quite a few others) as accepted, but they didn’t show up in the official report concerning progress towards graduation. After several phone calls, we discovered that the university just listed them because DS’s FIRST school reported them when he transferred. But the university needed the official report from College Board before they could count them. I paid the $15 to College Board for the report. So finally, today, the website is showing all the AP credits. Whew!
It turns out that after this semester, he still needs 21 hours of core requirements, so I guess he’s not a senior after all, but that’s life. He will be done with all his math classes this semester, at least.
Not to hijack this thread, but this brings to mind the worst story on this topic ever, and it happened to my best friend.
3 days before graduation from a prestigious LAC, he is informed that the English class he just completed his spring trimester of his senior year–which he got an A- in-- did not qualify to meet the distribution requirement for graduation. Both he and his advisor whiffed on it. School would not give a waiver, and he had to tell all his family not to come for graduation.
Fast-forward 30 plus years, he was so pissed off, he never did complete the classes, and never earned the degree. What a waste, and what a horrible thing to happen.
Walking with up to six credits missing is common, but to do those at a CC will likely need a waiver because many schools require the final x credits to be completed in house.
I have a friend who was 1 Spanish class short. She went through graduation in May, but the course wasn’t offered that summer. School required the last 30 credits to be taken on campus, so she never returned to get that last course. No degree for her. At this same school, my sister applied to graduate and they said no, that her last 30 credits weren’t on campus and she didn’t have a course with a written paper -in English! She was a French and German major, and she’d spent her junior year abroad. Even though the program was sponsored by the university, it shared the program with 2 other US schools and for her year, one of the other schools was the sponsor so it looked like she’d transferred those credits to her home university. With a lot of appealing and begging, the university decided to ‘bend the rules’ and declare that the program THAT IT SPONSORED was actually okay. They also accepted a paper she wrote in HS as the ‘paper in English’ requirement.
A classmate of mine applied for graduation and got the special ‘you cannot graduate’ letter (received on a Friday with spring break the next week, as required by the Marquis de Sade so you can’t get any answers fast). Turned out she was majoring in a school that issued a B.S. degree but also wanted a minor in history, a B.A. Well, our school didn’t award minors, so moved her to a double major, for which she didn’t have enough credits and didn’t have a foreign language. Problem solved by not issuing the history degree.
You do have to check all those requirements. Often.
The job of the executive/manager is to make logical exceptions to general rules.
Sometimes these things are negotiable. A lot depends on various imponderables. Good luck.
Can he sign up for six hours of 'independent study", take an incomplete, then finish in the summer?
Has anyone mentioned a possibly alternate close major he does fulfill?
One reason that this kind of situation happens all to often is because academic advisors are often grad assistants. They simply are not trained in the ins and outs of each major and so mistakes can easily happen. My daughter was a grad assistant and did academic advising for a year. She was the most experienced advisor in the dept because she’s been there the longest. She often caught mistakes that the other GAs made but it’s doubtful that she caught all of them.
Make you look at the course catalog of the year you entered the program, and make sure you go through a graduation audit before the last semester of senior year.
Actually, every semester before class registration is a good time to check on your progress toward graduation, so that you can be sure to take any needed sequenced prerequisites (or required courses offered only once per year or once every two years) in time (undeclared students should do this for all of their possible majors). It can also help you notice early whether you may be a few breadth courses or credit units short, so that you can plan for any extra courses during otherwise-lighter semesters, rather than having to cram all of it in during the last semester.
This happened to me a million years ago at the University of Washington. The advisor was a graduate student and pretty close to graduation he suddenly noticed that I hadn’t fulfilled the foreign language requirement (my responsibility to know, I get it). I tried taking intensive Hebrew summer quarter as it was the only 2 quarter language class that fit my internship schedule. I dropped after two weeks . . . there was just no way. I had German in HS and ended up placing into the last quarter that I needed to take at the local community college so I did it there and the U of W accepted it. I did officially graduate later, though, so the timing wasn’t very tidy. I was already headed back in the fall to graduate school there and somehow my not having actually graduated didn’t seem to register with anyone.
I guess the applicable info for this student would be that they may accept a community college credit for a distribution requirement, they did in my case even very late in the game.
Well, our experience is especially galling because S’s adviser is a tenured professor and chair of his department!! He just flat out screwed up and admitted that to us. Fortunately, since I wrote the original post, the college waived a 3-hour gen-ed class and I got a bigger bonus than last year at my work, and DH got a promotion that will give him a nice raise very soon. So at least the cost of the extra summer class is not going to be a huge problem. And one of S’s two roommates also will not graduate until August so he doesn’t feel badly about it at all. He is on the verge of landing an amazing internship that will probably lead to a fulltime job when he is finished anyway. All’s well that ends well, for us at least. And now we will get to attend out best friends’ son’s graduation from a local university that is on the same weekend in May that our S would have graduated. The worst part of it is that he may miss his sister’s high school graduation in June. And housing is still a possible issue.