Timeline for Resolving Incompletes

[jerseyjay]

1. At my school, incompletes are officially discouraged but in reality are left up to the discretion of the faculty. My general rule is I will not give a complete unless the student was doing well and something happened that made it impossible to finish the course.  In this case, I usually work out some timeline for the student. On occasion, I have unilaterally given an incomplete to a student who is getting an A in a class and then does not turn in the final assignment or something similar and this is out of character. But this is very rare. The reason I feel safe in doing this is that....

2. At my school, all incompletes automatically turn into failing grades around the middle of the semester. Thus if a student does not turn in the work, an incomplete will only kick the can down the road. This is one of the reasons I discourage incompletes: not only do they mean more work for me, but a student is almost always better off just turning something in at the end of term instead of trying to complete a paper AND do the work for the new term at the same time. All this said, it is possible to change an Incomplete that has turned into a failing grade long after the midterm. This requires submitting the permission of the dean's office and a written explanation by the professor (the same process to change any grade after the deadline has passed). I prefer not to do this since it does not reflect well on me, but I believe I changed an incomplete to a passing grade almost a year later for a required course (with my chair's approval).

In terms of COVID, I actually had fewer incompletes than normal. Students were given the ability to take a NC (No Credit) for a class with a notation about COVID on the transcript. This would not affect a student's GPA, and was done at the student's initiative.

I do not think I took an incomplete in school, mainly it seemed like more work than it would be worth. I remember that there students in my grad program who would have several incompletes per semester, and then they had to somehow finish them all at once, which in turn caused them to take incompletes in their present semester, which in turn..... Many of these students never finished the program.

[apl68]

Oh.  I read this thread title as Timeline for Resolving Incompetents.  Now that would be a disruptive innovation...

I've written employee improvement plans that were more properly titled "Timeline for Firing Incompetents". 

I have sadly found in my own experience that that's the most usual long-term solution, much as I've tried to seek alternatives.

[onehappyunicorn]

Incompletes are really a last resort for us prior to the pandemic, they are only supposed to be given in unusual circumstances. Incompletes have to be made up by the end of the next semester but can have a shorter timeline. All incompletes have to be approved by the chair.
If a student does not complete the work by the deadline then the incomplete automatically becomes an "F".

[mythbuster]

To be eligible for an incomplete, students must be otherwise passing the class. Our official window is a year, after which it defaults to an F. Although I think the student can get that changed if they finish the work even more than 1 year later.

My experience with incomplete students is that they fall in two groups. The first finishes things up within a week or so of the end of the semester. The others do nothing until one week or so from that 1 year deadline. You can guess which group does well, and which doesn't.

[RatGuy]

As an NTT faculty member, I've been explicitly told not to record incompletes unless I've been given explicit  instructions to do so from the respective administrator. Here the students submit excuses for work to a centralized office within student services, and they communicate with a liaison within the department in excusing material. It's supposed to take work off the plate of faculty members. That means that students who have life disruptions don't come to me, and I don't have to adjudicate them. This also goes for students who are pending an academic misconduct case (also not handled by faculty members).

Incompletes revert to an F at the end of the year, provided the instructor has not submitted a grade change request.

FWIW, I've only given two incompletes to undergraduate students in the last 6 years. One case a student was involved in a Title IX issue, and the mandate for the I came from that office. In another case, a student's father died (from Covid, I suspect, since it was in one of the early hotspots in our date). In neither case did the student follow up with me.