Virginia Tech offers students a pass on all coursework

BLACKSBURG, Va. – When you’ve just faced life-and-death tests, the stress of term papers and final exams can seem like too much.

So Virginia Tech said Thursday that students unable to finish coursework this spring because of the trauma of this week’s massacre won’t have to. And those students will qualify for credit with the grades they had earned before the killer struck.

In uncharted territory after the nation’s deadliest shooting rampage by an individual, school officials said they are seeking to ease students back into an academic routine with flexibility and compassion when classes resume Monday, a few weeks before the end of the school year.

“We have decided among ourselves that we are going to focus on the students first,” Mark McNamee, provost and vice president for academic affairs, said at a news conference. “And so the students are going to have choices about how they will complete the semester.”

The actions showed that Tech is groping for a balance in helping students through grief and nudging them back toward the mission of education.

“I think this reflects the realization that we’re in a place we’ve never been before, and it’s so radically different that we can’t even begin to think about business as usual,” said Terry Wildman, director of the school’s Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, which has been holding programs all week for faculty.

In a packed auditorium, hundreds of faculty from the College of Engineering met with administrators on how to help returning students.

The “Procedure for the Completion of the Spring 2007 Academic Semester” the university announced was carefully calibrated to give students options: They can elect to count only work completed as of Monday; they can count work until the attacks plus any other assignments they choose to complete; or they can count work from the entire semester. Officials emphasized that there are no hard-and-fast rules. They said students can switch to a pass/fail grade, change their mind about having an exam graded after taking it and even stay home for the rest of the year.

At the news conference, McNamee also said the university will pay homage to 27 students killed Monday by awarding them posthumous diplomas next month on graduation day. Five faculty members were also among the slain victims.

Brian Wheeler, an aerospace engineering student from Austin, said he was heartened by what he saw as a nurturing gesture – but a potentially complex one as well.

“The fear I personally have is that no one wants to be taking advantage of this, none of us want to feel like we sort of got something good out of this,” Wheeler, 22, said after leaving his department’s lab in his flip-flops despite chilly late-afternoon weather.

He said he doubted that anyone would abuse the offer, adding that he’d just seen colleagues working in the lab on a regular project. “It’s kind of a beautiful thing,” he said. Then he added: “But no one is judging each other here.”