To address concerns raised about the challenges facing graduate students during the pandemic, the Graduate Faculty Council recently approved a motion to temporarily allow any graduate student to convert a course taken in spring 2020 from “graded” to either “pass/fail” or “withdraw-audit,” with approval of the student’s major adviser and/or program director.

This option is available to all graduate students in a degree or certificate program under the jurisdiction of The Graduate School. The deadline for conversion of courses is May 22, 2020. Students can, but need not, wait until after receiving their grade to decide whether to seek a conversion. However, once a course is converted, it cannot be converted back to a letter-graded course.

For graduate students, a passing grade in a course converted to P/F is defined as an overall grade of C- or higher. A course for which the student has a P grade can, with approval of the major adviser (or, if appropriate, the program director), be included on the student’s graduate Plan of Study or Advisement Report. Courses that have been converted to Audit will appear on the student’s transcript as “WAU”. A course that has been converted to Audit cannot be used on a graduate Plan of Study or Advisement Report.

Any student wishing to convert a class to P/F or Audit should email their major adviser and/or program director requesting the conversion, indicating in the email the course number (including subject area), their Peoplesoft ID, and the requested conversion.

If the major adviser and/or program director approves, they should forward the student’s request, indicating approval of the request, to the Registrar’s Office (registrar@uconn.edu) and copy the student on the approval email.

The request should be sent by the student to the major adviser and/or program director no later than Monday, May 18, 2020. The approval email must then be sent from the major adviser’s and/or program director’s UConn email address to the Registrar’s Office by Friday, May 22, 2020. Extensions of the deadline (due to extenuating circumstances) will be allowed only with the approval of The Graduate School.