Is there honor in forgiveness?

Lawsuit stirs debate over program that some say leads to 'academic bankruptcy'

Depending on your point of view, Michael Walters of Park Ridge has either invented a new definition for chutzpah, or DePaul University didn't keep its promise.

Walters, a former DePaul student, is suing the university to force it to designate him an honors student even though some of his grades were not high enough for honors.

Walters' suit centers around a widely adopted but little-known policy at universities called "grade forgiveness," where a student can sometimes have poor grades removed from the pool of grades used to calculate grade point average.

Walters received grade forgiveness in some classes and his transcript's cumulative GPA came to 3.588 after the offending grades were removed, his suit claims. The "with honors" designation normally kicks in at a 3.5 GPA. But, the suit claims DePaul declined to give him the designation.

Walters contends his recalculated GPA should come with all the bells and whistles. He wants the designation to help him in his search for a job, his lawyer James Koch said.

Some students don't see it the same way.

"That's so audacious to go and demand honors," said an aghast Stefanie Nano, a 19-year-old DePaul sophomore from Bloomingdale. "He should be grateful."

Yet Koch says DePaul offered Walters a program that promised not to hold against him grades from a time when he was having trouble. Nowhere did it make clear that the reconstituted GPA wouldn't have the same benefits as a normal GPA, Koch said.

"If that's the case, then tell people that (up front)," Koch said.

Koch said he didn't know exactly how many of Walters' classes DePaul forgave, but said it was just "one or two." Walters ran into some problems while "he was addressing some personal matters" and decided to go the grade-forgiveness route, Koch said.

DePaul wouldn't address the specifics of Walters' case directly, but it said it believes the suit is without merit.

Although Walters' situation is probably unique, grade forgiveness isn't. DePaul, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Harper College employ grade forgiveness. Loyola, Northwestern, Roosevelt and University of Chicago do not.

The policy varies from institution to institution. In some places, a maximum of two grades can be forgiven. Other schools don't allow you to forgive courses in your major. At DePaul, students can get forgiveness for roughly a year's worth of classes, but it comes at a heavy price, said Caryn Chaden, associate vice-president for academic affairs at DePaul.

The student must attend school at a junior college for one year and earn a GPA of 3.0, or a B average. Only then, after showing they're serious about school, can students return and get forgiveness, she said.

"That's an important piece of it. It's not that you go home and sit … and think," she said. "You're restarting it (the GPA) based on evidence that the student has heard you and has demonstrated that they're ready to come back."

"If I was a university administrator and someone proposed this idea, I'd laugh," said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former science professor at Duke University.

Rojstaczer wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in 2003 bemoaning the trend of grade inflation, where more and more students are receiving A's and B's, essentially making it harder to distinguish the good students from the mediocre.

He said grade forgiveness just continues this dubious trend.

"It's a New Age thing and it does reflect the trend toward consumerism that's present in universities and colleges," Rojstaczer said. "You try to keep your customers happy -- even when they screw up."

Chaden, the DePaul administrator, said those who object to the program often don't take into account the type of nontraditional student that DePaul is committed to serving as part of its educational mission.

Believing the program is a way around performing well the first time, or that grades are grades and you shouldn't get second chances, "assumes a culture of people used to going to college," Chaden said. "If you are the first person in your family to go to school, there is a whole culture of experience and expectation that no one's shown you."

Koch, Walters' attorney, also defends the idea of grade forgiveness. He just thinks in this instance it should have come with a better explanation of what the program did and did not provide.

Koch notes that a form of grade forgiveness is now in effect at almost every school: late withdrawal. In that instance, students can withdraw from a class, sometimes very late into the semester, without having a bad grade assigned.

While grade forgiveness and late withdrawals used to largely be a matter of debate only among faculty members, it's more and more becoming a public policy issue, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

"These matters are becoming a little more broadly debated," he said. "Institutions are all over the map with it. … It has emerged as something of a problem."

Its most extreme form, where a student is allowed to start over completely, is sometimes referred to as "academic bankruptcy," a reference to the way adults are often allowed to restart their financial lives, he said.

"What you're describing is much more typically labeled 'academic forgiveness,'" Nassirian said.

But legislatures are starting to get involved -- at least at the public school level -- because of financial issues, Nassirian said. The more times a student can withdraw from a class or get grades forgiven, it "may induce existing students to sort of hang around" as perpetual students, he said.

That means the state is paying more for a frequent-repeater student's education than someone who goes straight through. Meanwhile, eligible students trying to enroll can't get in because the seats are full.

"So it becomes a kind of subsidy issue," Nassirian said.

In Texas, the legislature recently voted to limit students to six withdrawals during a student's career, Nassirian said.

If grades are forgiven for the purpose of the cumulative GPA, the group recommends still posting the forgiven grade, even if it's not counted toward the GPA, he said.

That's what DePaul does. So does Harper College in Palatine, said Phil Burdick, spokesman for Harper.

Rojstaczer, the former Duke professor, is still unconvinced.

"Everybody's awesome," he scoffed. "… we're moving in that direction."

Koch, Walters' lawyer, said the idea of grade forgiveness is designed for students who have overwhelming problems that can be rectified. It beats just unceremoniously booting them from college.

"It's a mulligan," said Koch, referring to the golfing term for a do-over. "You deserve a mulligan."