The College of Engineering established the following policies with regard to grades, the use of the Substitute Repeat Option and the useful lifetime of courses:
Since the institution of the punitive F in May 1991, the university has implemented the use of the substitute repeat option whereby the new repeated course grade will be used in the computation of the GPA and the student will receive degree credit only once.
The College of Engineering endorses the use of the substitute repeat option as a means to improve a student's GPA but limits its use to a maximum of five instances.
Students are allowed to earn a maximum of five grades of W and a maximum of three grades of UW and/or WA.
The College of Engineering limits the times that a student can repeat any given named required course in their program to three times. This is measured by the number of times the student is officially registered for the course at close of late registration (i.e., the number of times the course appears on the student's transcript).
Students are allowed to earn a maximum of five grades of F during their engineering program. Grades of F that h are subsequently replaced by the use of the Substitute Repeat Option count toward this total. Thus, a maximum of five F's can appear on the student's transcript (whether or not they enter into the calculation of the GPA).
Because of the rapidly developing nature of all engineering disciplines, the technical content of an engineering course has a finite lifetime after which the material may become outdated and no longer serve as a foundation for a current engineering degree nor as an appropriate prerequisite for follow-on courses. With this in mind, the College of Engineering places a statute of limitations of no more than eight years on all College of Engineering courses. In many cases, it may be deemed by the appropriate department that certain courses have lifetimes well below the eight-year maximum.
The implication of this statute of limitations for engineering courses is for students who have been out of school for an extended period of time and wish to reapply to Marquette to finish their degree program and for students who have been studying under a part-time basis and whose program has extended over many years.
As with all policies and procedures, the aim is to help provide the structure needed by some students to complete their engineering degree programs in a timely manner and to maintain the quality of our programs by awarding degrees to only those students whom we would be proud to proclaim as Marquette engineering graduates.
Policies such as those presented above are instituted to cover most of the cases where a guideline is needed to help keep students on track. However, there are always extenuating circumstances that may affect a student and cannot easily be incorporated into a given policy. For these cases, and for all the above policies, students may request special consideration through the use of the curriculum substitution and/or allowance form.