Overachieving might become easier if policy changes from the University Council’s Educational Affairs Committee are approved.

Dorfman

More students will be able to take advantage of the University’s undergraduate pass/fail course option, which allows students to enroll in courses outside their majors on a pass/fail basis.

Only about 10 students per semester participate in the pass/fail course option, but the changes proposed at the committee’s Monday meeting will work to increase that number.

Ann Crowther, associate vice president for instruction, said the point of the option is to encourage students to take challenging courses outside of their academic areas.

However, the policy does not allow some groups of students to participate.

“The current policy, as it stands, bans every part-time student from taking part in this policy — I take offense to that,” said Jeffrey Dorfman, co-chair of the committee. “The current policy, as it stands, bans every freshman from taking part — I take offense to that, too.”

The initial policy states the pass/fail option is available to students with second year status and at least 30 credit hours toward graduation during the preceding academic year.

“Our original thought was: get here, get established, then explore,” Crowther said.

Under the new policy, second year status will no longer be required and the 30 credit hour requirement will be reduced to 15 hours.

The policy now in place also states students must take a minimum of 12 hours of A-F based courses during the same semester in order to enroll in a pass/fail course.

Crowther and Gayle Andrews, the committee’s other co-chair, said these requirements were unfair to part-time students.

However they wanted to make clear the pass/fail option should not be used to allow students to get around withdrawal deadlines.

The new policy removes the 12 hour requirement, adding that only one pass/fail course may be taken per semester. 

Only three pass/fail courses will be counted toward an undergraduate degree.

Many parts of the old policy will remain the same in the new policy. 

Students wishing to take a pass/fail course must have a minimum GPA of 2.0. 

Pass/fail courses may only be taken as general electives. Core courses, major or minor requirements and college or institutional requirements may not be taken on a pass/fail basis.

Dorfman said the changes to the policy will give more students incentives to take harder classes outside their majors.

“The whole point of coming to the University of Georgia is there are uncountable classes at the University,” Dorfman said.

The new policy will be sent to the University Council’s executive committee for approval but will not take effect until summer 2011.