Senate representatives Austin Trupp and Josiland Chambers joined David Bigio, Mary Hummel and Dennis Passarella-George in listening at the Student Affairs committee meeting in Marie Mount Hall on Wednesday, April 29.
The University Senate’s Student Affairs Committee unanimously finalized recommended changes to clarify the University of Maryland’s excused absences policy at its meeting Wednesday.
The committee aimed to consolidate the many excused absence policies for students into one uniform policy students and faculty could follow. The bill also clarified language surrounding excused and unexcused absences.
The committee’s recommendations will be sent to the Academic Procedures and Standards Committee, which will review the issue in the fall semester, Student Affairs Committee Chairman Ian Chambers said. The Senate Executive Committee charged the Student Affairs Committee on Feb. 23 to submit its recommendations by the end of this semester.
Chambers, a graduate student who teaches animal sciences classes, said he believes these revisions, if implemented, would make the excused absence process clearer for students.
“The whole beauty of this policy is it’s going to make the process a lot easier for students to handle excused absences,” Chambers said.
The current policy requires a student to have a “verifiable source” to excuse an absence.
The committee’s recommendations provide a list of examples that satisfy the source requirement, such as death notices, police reports and court summons, which students might not have known counted as proof of an excused absence.
Kevin LaFrancis, an undergraduate member of the committee, said the revisions would make the policy better suited to the student body.
“We really discussed and parsed the wording of the legislation to make sure it tailored to every student’s possible concerns and questions that may come up,” said LaFrancis, a junior government and politics and journalism major.
Bereavement, the period of grief after the loss of a loved one, was also recommended by the committee to be added to the excused absence policy. While faculty and staff have bereavement policies that allow three or more days of excused absence, students did not, according to Chambers.
The committee decided it was necessary to have a similar policy for students but did not designate a specific number of days for student bereavement. Instead, the revisions call for a case-by-case length that the professor and student would decide.
Although the phrase “reasonable time” for a student to make up work is vague, the committee did not decide to designate a time frame, opting to let professors decide on a case-by-case basis.
Austin Trupp, an undergraduate on the committee, said the committee’s recommendations would benefit students.
“As a student, you don’t want to go through five different documents and read through all these things to just get absent from a class or two,” said Trupp, a senior government and politics major and business student. “It’s a lot more clear.”
Overall, the committee was united in support of its final recommendation and optimistic about the changes’ potential effects on students and faculty.
“I hope that the word gets out about what the excused absence policy is,” Trupp said. “I hope professors include it in the syllabus and that it actually does make some change and improves people’s ability to miss class and make up things.”
