By Maxim Tamarov, News Staff 

On Wednesday, Northeastern’s faculty senate motioned to withhold the changes to the GPA requirements for graduating with Latin honors that were supposed to go into effect this semester. The vote to postpone the GPA requirement by one year was unanimous.

“You certainly can’t wait to graduate for ten years and say I’m entitled to rely on the catalogue when I came in,” Richard Daynard, president of the Faculty Senate, explained, “but you are allowed to take five years.” Which is why the faculty voted to change the date of the new GPA requirements for 2015.

The policy was intended to increase the GPA threshold for cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude. Originally proposed to take effect for the graduating class of 2014, the update is now slated to take effect for the 2015 graduating seniors, due to concerns that the university community was not fairly informed of the changes.

“This is not a recent policy change,” Bruce Ronkin, vice provost for undergraduate education, wrote in an email. “The faculty senate unanimously approved an increase in the standards for ‘Graduation With Honors’ on March 31, 2010. They did it with the intent that it would take effect January 2014.”

But some concerned students said the changes weren’t sufficiently advertised. When students began to realize their honors standings were not what they had thought earlier in the semester, emails started pouring in to faculty members explaining the perceived unfairness of the policy update.

“I really had no idea [about the change],” Claudia Ng, a senior international business student, said. “On the website I had looked before — I think it was on Northeastern’s commencement office website — it still says the old requirements.”

Ng, who is studying abroad in Spain as part of her major program, said she found out about the GPA requirement change by accident.

“My academic advisor for international business [informed me],” Ng said. “Her main purpose wasn’t to visit us, I think she had a meeting here or whatever.”

Although it is unlikely she would have chosen other classes to take, Ng said that had she known about the change in advance she would have reached out for help in classes she was not doing so well in. A high achiever, Ng’s concern is about her status in receiving the highest honors.

“I can still graduate summa cum laude,” Ng said, “but I would need an A or an A- in the two classes that I have left. And they’re all in Spanish.”

And Ng was not the only student who expressed frustration with the changes. Since no emails were sent out to notify students of the change, many were not aware.

“I legitimately had no idea,” Isabel Shmulevich, a senior honors student studying English and linguistics said. Shmulevich said that her grades are good, but she had no idea where she was in the honors standing and never saw any emails about a GPA change. She did not look into it because, “it was never a priority.”

Yet for many seniors, like Ng, honors standing was a priority.

“It’s a university wide recognition of where you place compared to the other students in the university,” Ng said about the importance of the honors. “And it’s also something that looks good on your resume.”

Daynard said he received four or five emails detailing the concerns of students.

“[The students] have been talking about the fact that there wasn’t adequate notice,” he said.

But Daynard thinks this argument is misguided.

“I don’t think notice is the issue,” he said. “I think the issue is that students who came in that year were told they could rely on [the catalogue] when they came in.” Ronkin said the change had been published in every issue of the University Catalog since the 2010-2011 academic year to ensure that everybody had advanced notice.

Daynard and other faculty members began to reconsider the application year for the policy, since students are told they can abide by the catalog they receive upon matriculation.

The passing of the vote means this year’s seniors get a break. Next year’s seniors, however, will need to keep their grades up to earn Latin honors.