ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Professors at St. Cloud State University say courses have disappeared from some students’ transcripts with no input from instructors who gave them bad grades.
They said they’re not sure how widespread the problem is, but that with the exception of a few instances, the university’s failure to notify them of grade changes is an ethical breach.
“A number of faculty members raised concerns that they believed from what they were seeing that student’s grades were actually disappearing off transcripts. A student would take a course, get a poor grade, and then a semester or two later that grade would not appear on the transcript at all,” faculty association president Stephen Hornstein told Minnesota Public Radio for a story Monday (http://bit.ly/1bpLBzY).
Professor Tamara Leenay last spring came across the transcript of a student who failed an organic chemistry class she taught a couple of years earlier.
“I noticed the course was not even on his transcript,” Leenay said. “There was no ‘F.” There was no course number. … It was completely gone. And I have [a] record that he was in my class and that I gave him a grade … and I was never notified of any of these changes.”
Students can petition to have a course removed from a transcript. And professors say a late withdrawal or deleting a course from the transcript is appropriate in some instances beyond a student’s control, such as illness, family medical issues or military deployment. But under university rules, administrators are required to notify the course instructor whenever they change a grade.
“The thing here is that they weren’t being changed, they were going away,” Hornstein said. “And we weren’t being informed of that.”
