The Stumbling Student facing an Incomplete or F

Parent Cafe
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The Stumbling Student – when an Incomplete or Failure looms – from a parent who has been through the wash twice.

First – No one wants to be in this position. The student is likely to be highly anxious, deeply embarrassed and possibly profoundly angry. The parents are likely to be horrified and also deeply angry. Fears abound, including fears about money and time being wasted.

Second – Student, staff and family may all be quick to point to “laziness,” or “partying,” or “internet/gaming addiction.” In truth, what we may be seeing is illness and exhaustion with the coping mechanism of hiding. One positive step to take is to have an extensive health work up that includes evaluation for sleep apnea, allergies, mononucleosis, thyroid function, depression, poor diet, anemia, and diabetes. Another positive step is for the student and parents to meet with a family therapist or mediator so that the family can find paths to respectful communication.

Third - The college administration will be a maze to navigate, even at a small college. The student has to negotiate with the professor and then also deal with the Registrar’s office, the Academic Help office and the Financial Aid office. Each can have it’s own forms and deadlines and committees that review things.

Fourth – Colleges have an evil set up when it comes to the family unit (I use the word “evil” deliberately because of the pain created). When it comes to paying the bills, the student and parents are viewed as a unit. Both the student’s money and the parent’s money are tapped. Both the student and the parents are expected to take out loans if there isn’t cash on hand – and these loans cannot be discharged because of failure.
But when it is time to negotiate a path out of an incomplete or a failure, the student is perceived as an individual – not part of a family unit.
I suggest the family reject any path that has the student navigating alone. The student is in crisis. I’m not saying Mama or Poppa is sitting in on every lecture or make up exam – but a meeting with the professor and with an appropriate dean can generate a united front to problem solving. Make it clear that the college is dealing with Family Hernandez/Clan Campbell/Team Cohen/Tribe Smith or whatever family unit name that fits.

Two examples from my two sons:

Son One had a stellar high school academic record. Freshman year at college went well. He joined a fraternity and . . . suddenly he was missing class and falling asleep in class. We got a letter saying he was on academic probation. His grades for the term were dismal. Sounds like a classic case of “Too much partying”, doesn’t it? Fortunately a fraternity brother heard Son asleep on a sofa. “Man, you snore!” he said. “Do you have sleep apnea?”

We had never heard of such a thing. It took moving Heaven and Earth to get a referral and a sleep evaluation over the summer break but the pulmonologist said our son had the classic body type for sleep apnea: large frame, relatively small air passages. Yes, the weight gain that came from discovering beer contributed to the severity, but he had always snored and almost certainly had a milder form of sleep apnea throughout high school.

It took an extra summer term to recover academically, but with the help of a CPAP machine, Son One graduated with his class.

Son Two I have likened to a bioluminescent deep sea creature because of his flashes of brilliance bookended by murkiness. He’s always been a low energy guy. He was able to attend classes and chat in an informed way – only to lack the energy and focus to complete assignments. (Thank God for standardized testing because he dazzles at multiple-choice exams. Not true for all students, but it has saved this one more than once).

A diagnosis of ADD at the end of the college freshman year seemed to help. With a stimulant, focus was better. But the next year at college was a struggle. Fall of the junior year was a disaster. We brought him home.

The following summer he tried a course at a local college and that went well enough. Then he tried a full course load and stumbled yet again. He was miserable and I was furious. I recognize now that a good part of my fury was fear based. I didn’t see how we could afford an extended college path and I didn’t see how he could earn his way in life without some sort of professional credential. The constant low energy levels meant construction jobs or the military were not good options.

I was also furious that my son had hidden his deteriorating situation from us. He pointed out, “You say that a lie is worse than a failure, but how would you have reacted if I had told you what was happening?” Gulp. He was right.

We got to the end of the school year and he was massively behind. The professor rightly assigned an Incomplete.

It took several months of hard work before he was even ready to begin the makeup work. We met with a family therapist while he also saw a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a physician.

Together, my son and husband installed some computer tracking software so it was clear what was happening during “study” sessions.

Then there was the meeting with the nutritionist (Ye Gods, we were turning over every rock and this seemed a stretch). She immediately suggested that fatigue could be connected to gluten sensitivity. I balked. We had tried gluten free when the lad was in middle school to no effect. “How long were you gluten free?” the nutritionist asked. “A week,” I said. “Oh, no. You have to at least a month. Maybe as much as three months.”

I wasn’t keen on that idea but Son had a blood test that indicated there was something there. We embarked on gluten free eating.

Nine days later the sun came out. I couldn’t believe how bright eyed and happy Son Two has become. His focus and writing improved. Over the course of a few weeks his ability to stay on task went from a handful of minutes to an hour and more. He giggles now and then. Work assignments began flowing. He’s close to caught up.

The physician added in probiotics. Apparently C section offspring and ADD students can often have gut issues. Additional improvements are unfolding.

The therapist said, “don’t overlook the cheap stuff. Exercise is free and works to address many things.” The dog is delighted with the extra excursions.

There’s still some clean up work remaining – but I am amazed at how a gluten free diet has changed things for this Son. All that work with the professionals has paid dividends too. I’m working hard to be less volatile and Hubby is more engaged.

If a student is facing an Incomplete or a Failure, please don’t think “laziness.” Think “overwhelmed and embarrassed with sides of anxiety and anger” and work from there. The student is an adult – one that is in a deep hole. Hiding and quitting (including suicide) can seem the only choices. And yet a team commitment and dealing with underlying problems can address the disaster and rebuild the life.

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Thanks for sharing this!

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Yes, thanks very much. Very useful info and a good reminder to check everything.

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Also keep in mind that your student can sign a FERPA waiver to allow you access to academic information.

http://www.collegeparents.org/members/resources/articles/what-ferpa-means-you-and-your-college-student

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^ Definitely This. The college is not “evil” because it enforces federal law and your child did not sign the waiver.

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It’s an evil situation. There are thousands of dollars at stake. If loans are involved, then it also colors the next decade or more of the family’s financial life. Even with a a FERPA form in place, the dean, professor or staff can function as a border collie, separating out the student and leading the student to think that all problem identifying and problem solving is on the student’s plate. If we’re saying it is the family’s responsibility to pay (or borrow) then it should be the family unit that navigates to a solution – which may be the student withdraws or the student earns an Incomplete - or fails. Keep in mind, please, that parents/guardians usually have some life experience with poor staffing or poor management. The parents may be able to ask questions that don’t occur to the student - and, in the long run, may lead to improvements in the class or department for future students.
But expecting the family to pay and only the student to interact gives the college maximum leverage and minimal accountability.

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I don’t think that the professor should be discussing the plans to satisfy an incomplete with the adult student and the adult student’s mom. Parents can ask the student to copy them on emails and offer guidance on what the emails might say.

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I don’t disagree that it is a family problem to pay but it feels like you are inferring the school is trying to “get” the student. It’s not. And the examples of your two sons, while excellent exhibits of following the clues, have nothing to do with whether or not you were involved in the issues. It took chance notice for S1 and a detailed medical check up for S2. How would that have been different?

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I think it is very easy for an instructor or administrator or staff member (such as a member of the registrar’s office) to add to a student’s despair and self loathing. It is an easy path to think “lazy” or “immature” or “not bright enough” when there may be other things at work. If you are 18 or 19 and see others succeeding and the people “in charge” labeling you as incompetent, that may be enough to savage hearts and destroy resilience.

Institutions are made up of individuals. Most campus staff have very full plates and deal with a wide range of personalities. Hopefully truly vicious faculty and staff are rare (but do exist) – what’s more likely is that a busy educator or administrator moves through a problematic situation briskly. Being faced by a Team or Clan tends to make the process slow down enough that there is a fair look.

I did leave out many details (the medical scheduling clerk who told me that it would take six months for a referral for a sleep study and that our student could just “wait at home” to see if there was a cancellation – something for a determined parent to refuse to accept – not for an exhausted 19 year old to fight – I got moved up the food chain to a manager and we got a slot – not a great time of day, but we were glad to have it).

I also left out the great frustrations I had trying to contact campus staff as my sons each began “hiding” behaviors. When they weren’t returning phone calls and weren’t emailing, I knew something wasn’t right – but picking up the phone or using the college websites to figure out how to check on each son got me anything from a lukewarm reaction to a downright cold front – each implying I was overly involved and a micromanager – whereas I was seeing two, then three weeks of silence as a concern.

Please be aware that college policies vary widely and that variation can help a student sink or swim. In my state, Washington State University has a forgiving policy for low grades. The student is allowed to repeat the course and can substitute a subsequent A or B for a previously earned D or F. This can be critical for the student who needs a certain GPA to enter a junior or senior level specialty program, such as computer science. However, across the state at Western Washington University there is no such policy. Failing a course is a permanent mark on the record and it can take an extra year of attendance (succeeding at everything) for the GPA to get repaired so that a junior level course can be taken.

I write here using strong language like “evil” because I think policies that heighten self loathing or add significant financial burdens can suck the joy from life. We have a nation wide educational system that is not working for thousands. We have exhausted high school students, college students struggling to finish degrees and graduates facing decades of debt. I don’t see college staff as hawks waiting to stoop on mouse like students – but I don’t see college Trustees screaming for more paths for success – or for more awareness of the many things that can trip students up.

I know CC is the sort of forum where highly involved parents come – sometimes to justify to themselves that more close parenting is appropriate. Yikes! There are some appetites that should not be fed. But when a student is failing, it is no time for the student to be unsupported.

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Thank you for the great posts and insights, Olymom.

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I know a family with two very bright kids, but each failed a class in college.
One kid thought they were doing better than they were, and it was somewhat of a shock, the other seemed to be placed above their skill set, and tried to drop the class before it was too late, but the professor talked them out of it.
[he school newspaper did a story on it](http://www.westernfrontonline.net/news/article_40200e52-8b87-5ce3-86af-28d448c7e3b3.html?mode=jqm)
For a kid with seasonal affective disorder, combining a tough schedule with winter quarter was too much.
But while I think the parent might have felt like asking the prof why he didn’t listen to a student when they tried to advocate for themselves, it is separate from how the tuition is paid.
Both students now have their degrees, with good jobs, one finished grad school, the other is thinking about it.

If you never fail, it means you aren’t reaching high enough. We learn more from our mistakes, than our successes and all that. In any case, a bad grade isn’t the end of the world, and perhaps it will be motivation to check in more with the professor.

It’s been a while since I was a college advisor, but I think it is more typical for grades to be averaged, than replaced.

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I have one kid with several severe chronic health conditions, and another with a serious psychiatric diagnosis. First, once a diagnosis is documented (and for Olymom this happened after the fact), make sure that the student registers with the disabilities office for accommodations. This can include ADHD, migraines, depression, anything that is a documentable diagnosis that affects daily living.

Meetings with disabilties offices happen only with the student. I will say that I helped behind the scenes by saving or obtaining documents, and often wrote letters for MD’s to sign with list of accommodations I had researched.

In general, I agree with the idea that parents can stay out of things, for the sake of the developing maturity of the student, unless there are safety concerns. There are, however, important exceptions. One is, when the college’s own procedures for helping a student are not working. Example, one daughter went on medical leave due to a change in freshman dean staffing; accommodations were not being provided adequately. When they sent a letter with unreasonable (incorrect) requirements for reentry, I called the dean. He told me I should not be involved. I told him that when they had a functioning staff, and sent out the correct letter- and when my child was well enough to be up to self-advocacy- I would be glad to step back.

Otherwise, over the following years, when staff were excellent and caring, I (infrequently) sent e-mails to the dean that were brief, respectful, and acknowledged the unusualness of a parental e-mail, ONLY when my child’s health was so bad that she was unable to communicate herself. In those e-mails I always emphasized it was with my child’s permission but that I would step out as soon as possible and she would resume normal communication as an adult student.

For my other child, I also e-mailed a dean to let them know what I thought was going on, kept it brief, and wrote only in the spirit of giving the dean, counseling staff and advisors a nudge. They then had a meeting with my child and worked up a plan.

In other words, it is a good thing to maximize the child’s independence and the student’s own relationships within the institution. But there are times when it needs to be recognized that parental involvement is needed. Done in that spirit, the college seems to appreciate the heads up.

That said, I cannot tell the number of times one of my kids has called for an appointment and gotten a date three months ahead, and I have called back to get a cancellation date the next week :slight_smile:

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I think I might have a different expectation about the level of involvement of the institution in my children’s lives. Yes, they lived/live on campus, but I don’t see the institution as responsible for their personal well being. Their job is to provide a safe environment that is conducive to learning, to make services available to help when there are issues, and maybe even to encourage use of those services. I don’t expect that they’re checking up on my kid or wanting to play detective. And yes, I did have one with a pretty big issue that emerged during the college years.

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As a professor, I would just say that my job is to try to get the students to learn X, Y, and Z. Not to diagnose and/or deal with their medical or emotional issues. I’m not a medical doctor or a psychiatrist. It’s not that I don’t care, but that’s not my job. There are other professionals on campus for those things. Inasmuch as this is true, it doesn’t matter what I think about why they are failing.

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About the OP’s concern that failing students are full of despair and self loathing – really, it would be hard for the student’s despair and self-loathing not to worsen when the student’s mom thinks she needs to be directly involved with the professor-student discussions about incompletes. Despair ultimately is a feeling of helplessness and the mom’s actions wouldn’t be helping with that.

Faculty often are discouraged from granting incompletes without there being a clear plan of action put in writing for completing the work as many students requesting incompletes never complete the work. Parents can certainly provide input to the student’s correspondence with faculty about the plan for completion.

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Sylvan8798 tells us it is “not my job” to ferret out why a student is failing – but we are a tonal species. If an instructor is flippant, sarcastic, dismissive or disdainful, then a message is being sent – and it’s not “hey, get yourself checked out throughly. There may be somethings going on health wise that are holding you back.”

The year my son withdrew from WWU there were five suicides in the student body. It’s not that big of a campus. One component of suicide can be the feeling that there is not a path forward to an improved place. A sense of isolation can be deadly.

My background is as a scientist. A cool thing about that training is we are to observe first. Years ago I observed that teacher conferences went better when my husband came with. It was irritating because sometimes he would arrive home from weeks of field work and not be up to speed on school stuff – but when we arrived at the conference suddenly the atmosphere was more respectful, responses more complete, vocabulary more specific than when I had attended by myself. So I told Dear Hubby “You’re coming. Every time.” Often the teacher would address Hubby while I sat like a lump on a log – that worked. Lots to be learned by log sitting.

Same goes for the college student navigating a disaster. It’s not my responsibility to plug every leak or oversee every email – but all hands are on deck until the worst of the storm passes. My sons are amazing men and it is my job to see that they can do fine without me. Their self esteems seem to be amazingly robust – and their experiences with being both smart and failing has (I think) contributed to their widely respected reputations for kindness.

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WSU may have a grade forgiveness policy, but UW does not. One F does not keep you from graduating.
I see I commented on this over three yrs ago, when my own daughter was at Huxley.
There was a suicide in 2012, but I cannot find info about five in one yr? :frowning:
Handling communication with a prof, is something I would expect students to have practiced with their teachers in high school. If students are not ready to advocate for themselves in college, then a gap year can be used as a tool to acquire maturity and skills.Im a big fan of gap years as I see kids entering campus with a sense of purpose after such, rather than college being just another slog through the classroom treadmill that they have been on since they were five.

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This is only tangentially related, but I do think that from what I’ve heard from DS, college now, at least at some institutions, is much less personal and involves much less interaction with professors than it did 30 years ago. It also seems to have become much more “cut and dried” with alot of technology involved in streamlining things, and therefore setting up a much more narrow path to success than was there 30 years ago. So, in some cases profs really have almost no interaction with their students or even their students’ work unless the student reaches out for help; they’re not in the loop at all in some cases, apparently. This certainly makes it easier for a student to feel completely isolated and for a prof to be completely clueless or at least less than encouraging when a student does reach out for help. And this is true even at institutions where the enrollment is no bigger than it was 30 years ago. I find it disheartening and disappointing to hear my DS talk about taking multiple choice exams in classes like physics and calculus, having homework in these same technical classes done online via WebAssign, and computer programming assignments graded my an auto-grader online that will hiccup at the slightest deviation in output formatting (even if the meaningful part of the code works as assigned). 30 years ago, in engineering school, I never once had a multiple choice exam in a technical subject. All my homework was written and handed in and graded by a TA. But the prof at least flipped through the graded papers to have some idea of what was going well with his students and where they were stumbling. And when I went into office hours, even though I was in a big class, he had some semblance of an idea of how I was doing. There was some personal connection between student and teacher; that seems to have become much more limited by the use of technology to take the instructor out of the assessment loop almost completely. Makes it much more isolating and a much more narrowly defined path for success.

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There are often other types of staff to help students, and to mediate between students and professors. I think these functions have actually increased. But the student needs to seek them out and use them.

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^^This has been my experience as well, having two kids who have attended our flagship university as PSEO students. Contact with professors is extremely limited–and TA’s just don’t seem to know their stuff or feel an obligation to post solution sets or exam scores in a timely fashion. It’s unfortunate. It’s another reason I feel really good about my kiddos attending a small school that touts its strong relationships between student and faculty and that doesn’t rely on TA’s and adjuncts to teach classes.