Spring 2021 CICS Graduate Program Rule Changes in Response to COVID-19

For the Spring 2021 semester, CS graduate students may elect SAT/Fail grading for any CS graduate course (500 level and higher).

A SAT (satisfactory) grade earned in a CS graduate elective course taken in Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and/or Spring 2021will satisfy an elective requirement.

A SAT (satisfactory) grade in a CS MS or PhD core course taken in Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and/or Spring 2021 will satisfy a CS MS or PhD graduate core requirement and can be used as part of the PhD portfolio process (admission to PhD candidacy) in this or any later semester. That includes satisfying conditional passes of the portfolio process from earlier semesters.

A SAT (satisfactory) grade earned in a CS graduate certificate course will satisfy the corresponding CS graduate certificate requirement. This includes courses taken toward the Certificate in Statistical and Computational Data Science and the Certificate in Information Security.

Courses taken under Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading in Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and/or Spring 2021 will not count toward the total number of Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory credits that CS programs allow a student to use toward their graduate degree.

The Graduate School rule (not affected by this change) is that no more than one half of the credits applied toward a graduate degree may be SAT graded.

A letter grade of C or higher corresponds to a SAT.   An instructor may not change the criteria used for passing - any grade in the range of A-C will correspond to a SAT.

A SAT grade does not affect your GPA at all. It goes into neither the numerator nor the denominator of the GPA calculation. It does add to your credits completed, of course. 

As in all semesters, a grade of F (fail) will be assigned when students do not earn a SAT (satisfactory) grade. The F grade will appear on your transcript and will be reflected in your GPA.

The rules relating to incompletes have not changed.  The campus Academic Regulations from the Office of the Provost say this:
 
“Students who are unable to complete course requirements within the allotted time because of severe medical or personal problems may request a grade of incomplete from the instructor of the course. Normally, incomplete grades are warranted only if a student is passing the course at the time of the request and if the course requirements can be completed by the end of the following semester.”
 
We have asked instructors to be lenient and compassionate in interpreting the highlighted phrase above.  Note also that the next sentence uses the word “Normally” and this semester is not normal.

Students request Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading directly by informing the instructor in writing, e.g., by email. If a student encounters an issue with an instructor in choosing SAT grading, the student may email the appropriate staff member contact indicated below for assistance in resolving the issue.

The instructor is required to honor requests received by Tuesday, May 4, 2021.  Instructors may (at their option) honor requests received later, even after grades have been recorded in SPIRE.  This process and rules are different from those used in Spring 2020. We ask that instructors be mindful of the particular stresses and unusual difficulties of this time of COVID and remote-only instruction.

We are leaving that up to individual instructors, again requesting they be mindful of the difficulties of teaching and learning at this time.

A letter grade below a cutoff will not count as satisfying a core requirement. A SAT grade will count.

Master's students can email Elizabeth Parolski, MS program advisor at eparolski [at] umass.edu, and/or make an advising appointment.

PhD students should contact their faculty advisors or email Eileen Hamel at ehamel [at] cs.umass.edu, graduate programs manager, PhD advisor.