Putting a W for a dropped course after the drop/add period

Candi Roberts

Do you have a way to show that a course was dropped after the drop/add period? How do you do it? I know we could enter a W grade, but that actually would cause an issue with our uploads to the state for scholarships. Our guidance counselor would like there to be some "sting" for dropping a course after the deadline. What do you do?

Brian Gray

We drop the student from the course, and then we add a transfer course to record the W.

We have a separate grade translation that we use for odd situations: Credit from another school, Credit by exam, No Credit, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory (our equivalents for Pass/Fail), and Withdrawn. When adding the transfer course, we use the name of the course that the student dropped.

It appears on the transcript (because the course equivalent is marked to include on transcripts. If you're running and Advanced List to get the data for your upload to the state, it would be fairly easy to exclude the grade W from the list, or to manually remove them from the CSV file.

Candi Roberts

It would be cumbersome if there were several students because of the way our download works. We already have multiple steps preparing the file for upload. That may be our only option, though.

Catherine Druhan

We have to leave the student enrolled in the course because we want it to still populate on their transcript. So I have to excuse all the future absences from the course and enter the final course grade as a W/P for withdraw passing. It is a bit clunky because they have to remain on the role to have a final grade. Blackbaud says it is the only way for us to do this. I wonder if the Blackbaud Higher Ed has a better way.