Academic Issues

Grading/Re-grades

Please refer to the campus booklet entitled Grading Information (contact Samira Khazai) for complete details. Particular attention should be paid to awarding Incompletes. An "I" should be awarded only if a student has serious problems, health or otherwise, during the last week of classes. A student must have a passing grade to be granted an "Incomplete." Prior to that, a student should withdraw from the course if he/she finds him/herself unable to complete the work required. Incompletes must be made up by the next quarter at the latest. This can be a problem if you, as an instructor, are not on campus then, or are not teaching the same course. It is your responsibility to help the student remove the "I" grade by accepting late work or administering a special final exam during that next quarter.

Academic Dishonesty

The best solution to cheating is prevention. You should state in writing in your course syllabus exactly what is expected of students: if collaboration on homework programs or projects is not allowed, this must be specified ahead of time in writing. If students are to undertake exams without notes (closed book), this should be stated. During exams, students should be spread apart as much as possible, and TA's and/or faculty should proctor exams carefully. Completed exams should be logged immediately against class lists to determine who did or did not take the exam. Students who did not take the exam should be confronted immediately and before graded exams are handed back with the fact that you have no exam for them. Students have been known to leave exam rooms with copies of the blank exam, fill them in after graded exams are handed back, and then claim that the professor failed to log their exam. Numbering exam copies, counting them so that each student can only receive one, carefully logging after examination, putting invisible or unique marks on graded exams, etc., are mechanisms for avoiding this problem. (Contact Samira Khazai for a copy of the UCSD's Instructor's Guide for Preventing and Processing Incidents of Academic Dishonesty). Also, some instructors have students sign contracts about the consequence of cheating (contact Samira Khazai). In addition, the MOSS program has recently been utilized to prevent cheating.