Advising
Course waivers and substitution
Declarations of both majors and minors
Certification of minor completion
Awarding of departmental honors
Department internships
1. Chairs have the option of assigning students to advisors in their departments. Alternately, they may provide a list of advisors to Academic Advisement who will assign advisors to incoming freshmen and transfer students using that guidance. Chairs may assign students to themselves for advisement.
2. Prior to pre-enrollment, all students majoring in one of the department’s programs should be sent a letter encouraging them to make an appointment with their advisor to discuss courses to be taken in the following semester(s). Planning their course work with their advisors helps to prevent problems with the students’ schedules later as certain required courses may not be offered every semester. This helps avoid the necessity for course substitutions as graduation nears.
3. You may elect to use a form to plan out the
student’s courses over four years. A
sample is provided under the link AdvisementPlanningForm.doc
Course waivers and substitutions
Course waivers and substitutes are used when students are, through no fault of their own, unable to take required courses. Timely and accurate advising often eliminates the need for students to get course waivers and substitutions. The proper form can be obtained from the Office of Academic Advisement (click on the button for Forms or go directly to the waiver/substitution form)
Once signed, the form must be submitted to Academic
Advisement by the faculty member.
Students must not handle signed waiver and substitution forms.
Transfer students come in with various courses which they took at their previous college(s). The courses are evaluated by Academic Advisement based on information provided by the faculty. They may ask the Chair for an opinion on articulation for a particular course if they have no prior experience with that course. You may advise them to accept the course for that individual student, advise them to accept the course for all incoming transfer students, or advise them not to accept that course for transfer credit.
Courses may substitute exactly for courses in your department, in which case your course number will appear on the student’s advisement document. If there is no equivalent course at SUNY-Oneonta, the course credit will appear as 10E or 20E (for example, ESCI 10E for a course which isn’t exactly the same as ESCI 100 or any other ESCI course). Again, you may be asked for your input on specific courses at other colleges.
There will be students who complain that they took courses at another college but no transfer credit was granted for some or all of them. If, upon examining the course descriptions, or better, the course syllabi, you can determine that the courses were, in fact, equivalent to courses at SUNY-Oneonta, you may petition Academic Advisement by writing a memo explaining the reasons why you feel that student should get credit.
Undergraduate students may take up to 18 semester hours or credits (s.h.) in a single semester. If a student wishes to take more the 18 s.h., that is a course overload. He or she must go to the Registrar’s office, get and fill out a form (not online yet) and submit that to the Dean of your division for approval. Don’t expect to get approval if the student has a marginal GPA or lower.
At the initial advising session of orientation during the summer, freshmen will declare a major.
Transfer students declare a major when they arrive in Oneonta. Many students will change their major at least once. Students have the right to change majors. The required form is called a declaration/change of major form (and change of advisor form). If you are the chair of the department with the major the student is dropping, you simply need to sign the form (dept. signature). If the student is declaring a major within your department, you need to assign an advisor and sign. If your department has changed the requirements for that major recently, you will need to decide which requirements the student must follow.
It is helpful to conduct a short exit interview to determine why the student is changing majors, although they don’t have to divulge their reason(s). By simply asking, you may obtain useful information which may alert you to problems with a major or changing student interests which your faculty may want to address.
Freshmen are assigned advisors upon their arrival at
Oneonta. You may allow Academic
Advisement personnel to assign advisors.
If your department has more than one major, you submit a form specifying
which faculty members advise which majors.
Alternately, you may direct Academic Advisement that you will assign the
advisors for freshmen yourself using the major declaration form as you would
with a continuing Oneonta student who is changing majors.
Certification of minor completion
Students wishing to get credit for completing a minor should consult with their advisor prior to taking courses for that minor to be sure he or she knows which courses will be required and when they will be offered. Upon completion of all courses, the student fills out the information requested on the Application for Minor form, including what courses were taken and what grades were assigned. The student should provide a copy of his or her advisement form a.k.a., arrow sheet to the chair. You verify the courses were taken and the grades that were assigned. If the minor has been completed to your satisfaction, you certify that on the bottom of the Application for Minor form and send it to the Registrar’s office yourself.
Awarding of departmental honors
At the end of each spring semester, a staff person from the Registrar’s office will send you a memo listing individually each graduating senior with a cumulative GPA of 3.5 who is thus eligible for departmental honors. You should verify by signing that these students will graduate with departmental honors and return it to the Registrar’s office.
Your department may have a policy in place that internships are required for completion of the major(s). To implement such a policy requires changes to the major which must be submitted to the Curriculum Committee and possibly the College Senate for approval.
A student who wishes to have a College endorsed internship must have successfully passed the College Writing Exam, must have completed at least 56 semester hours of study with at least 12 of those completed at Oneonta. The student must also have a minimum cumulative GPA of 2.0, both overall and in his or her declared major.
Your department may have agreements with various organizations that sponsor internships, in which case the student may be referred to one of them. Alternately, the student may arrange for an external internship sponsor or a faculty member could facilitate an agreement for a company or organization to sponsor a student. There must also be a faculty sponsor from the College willing to oversee the internship. It is the faculty sponsor’s responsibility to be sure that the internship will provide an educational experience for the student and to assign an academic component (papers, journals, portfolios, etc.) which will be used as part of the student’s evaluation.
There is a College Undergraduate Internship Application form, downloadable from the College Registrar’s website. This form provides places to ensure that the student meets the minimum academic qualifications, that the on-site sponsor agrees (a signature is required but may be obtained via fax), and that there is approval from the faculty sponsor, the department chair, and the Divisional Dean. It also requires a description of the internship in some detail. The student, in consultation with his/her prospective on-site sponsor, should provide a draft of this description. Then the faculty sponsor should be consulted before signing the form.
Independent studies are special courses, not regularly scheduled or listed in each semester’s Schedule of Classes. Generally, a single student is chosen or volunteers for a project and applies for the course. Independent studies can be numbered as 199, 299, or 399, e.g., GEOL 399, or, in general, SUBJ XXX where SUBJ is the subject designation (GEOL, HIST, BIOL, etc.) and XXX is the number. Freshmen may propose to take SUBJ 199. Sophomores may propose SUBJ 299 and juniors or seniors may propose SUBJ 399. The College also imposes other restrictions as follows:
Students must have completed at least one semester’s work in a degree program at SUNY-Oneonta.
The student must have a cumulative GPA of 2.0 or greater, with very few exceptions.
The limits are: no more than 6 s.h. independent study in any one semester and no more than 30 s.h. total count toward a degree.
There is a form for undergraduate independent study in which this information is elicited. In addition, the student must formulate a project description which clearly describes what will be studied and how it will be addressed. Details of how the work will be evaluated and mechanics of the interactions between the student and faculty sponsor must be included. Independent Studies always get letter grades. Signatures will be needed from the faculty sponsor, the chair of the department hosting the subject, the chair of the department of the student’s major, and the student.
An independent study is a good vehicle for student-faculty research support but can also be used for special projects involving creative work or performance. Occasionally students need 1-2 s.h. for graduation, to reach a particular level such as junior standing, for full-time status, etc. An independent study is a mechanism for satisfying those types of needs while providing a non-trivial educational experience.
It is possible to offer to one student a course already listed in the course catalog, but not specially scheduled in a particular semester. That is an individual course enrollment. The faculty member must agree as this will involve an additional preparation above an beyond his/her normal load. Usually the faculty member makes the course proposal. It is essential to explain why the student can’t take the course during one of the semesters when it is normally offered. Individual course enrollment is often used in the case of graduate courses which are not regularly scheduled. In this case, more than one student may be involved. Each one must fill out an individual course enrollment form. This form must be signed by the faculty member who will instruct in the course, the student’s advisor if he or she is a graduate student, the department chair, and the divisional dean.
Faculty members have been known to issue the incorrect grade to a student for a variety of reasons. With hundreds of students per semester, errors are inevitable in grade entry, course average calculations, etc. When such a grade error is discovered, the faculty member should fill out a grade change form. These are short and simple. In addition to technical information such as the course number and CRN, the semester involved, the grade assigned in error, and the corrected grade, an explanation must be presented. It can be very short, i.e., numerical error. The form is signed by the department chair and submitted directly to the Registrar’s office.