Welcome to week 7! I’m Benjamin Wreath, a junior studying Speech Communication. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but dead week is coming way too fast for me. I am really starting to wonder how I am going to make it through finals week with my GPA intact.
I know first-hand that it can be very difficult to get the grade you want in all of the 4, 5 or 6 classes you are taking. I have signed up for a baccalaureate core classes that sounded interesting at first, but turned out to be more challenging than the rest of my classes put together. My sophomore year I was doing poorly in one of my classes, and I really didn’t want to ruin my GPA so I considered dropping that class. I was at 14 credits, and this class was worth 3… It wasn’t possible. In order to keep my financial aid I had to be a full time student (12 credits or more). I had no idea what to do, so I made an appointment with my advisor to find out what my options were.
My advisor told me how I can take a class, stay full time, earn credit for it, but not have the poor grade affect my GPA. Did you know that you can earn as low as a C- in a class and not have it bring down your GPA? Sweet deal huh? Little did I know you can do what students call “S/Uing” a class. This is where you can take a class and either receive an “S” or a “U” as a grade. It’s very similar to taking a class as pass or fail. Where you either, well… pass it for fail it. S/U stands for Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory. If you are able to pull off that C- in a class, or better, you get a Satisfactory grade. That means that you will get the credits from the class and it satisfies the area of your core without counting towards your overall GPA. On the reverse side, if you earn a “U” you won’t get any credit for the class, but it still keeps your GPA looking pretty.
The process to S/U a class is fairly simple to do. All you need to do is go by the CLA advising office in 213 Gilkey Hall, have a pen in hand, and a “Change of grading basis” form from the Office of Registrar page found on our OSU webpage or from the CLA advising office. You need to get the form signed by your advisor and returned to the registrar. All request forms must be submitted by the end of this week (week 7) so if you’re thinking about it you better hurry! Forms have to be received in the registrar’s office by Friday, November 11th at 5pm.
I have only changed one class to S/U so far, and this term I’m about to bump my total up to two. Sometimes it’s hard to get the grade you want, even if you are giving the class your all. This grading system can give you the break that you need so that you can get the grade you want in your major specific classes. Remember though, once you change your class to S/U, it’s permanent, you can’t change it back even if you get an A in that class. I another friend that S/U’d a lab science her senior year. She earned a D+ in the class, which would have satisfied the requirement for one of the lab sciences in the bacc core she needed to graduate, but because she changed the class to S/U, she did not get credit and had to take another lab science. S/Uing a class is a great option, but make sure to think it through and talk it over with your advisor. It was a life saver for me!
