Student Access for Dropped, Withdrawn, or Incomplete Courses

Dropped Class

Students must drop a course before the add/drop deadline, which typically falls on the 4th Monday of the semester for Fall and Spring classes. When a student drops a class by removing it from their schedule in MySlice, they will automatically be unenrolled from the course in Blackboard within 12 hours.

When a user is unenrolled in Blackboard, their user profile and any items they have created in the course are disabled and hidden from view, but not deleted. This disabled status cannot be restored by an automated re-enrollment, and requires a manual override by a Blackboard system administrator. If a student needs to be re-added to a course they previously dropped for any reason (such as dropping the main class section to enroll through an independent study instead), the instructor should contact help@syr.edu to request that the student’s access be restored. Be sure to explain in the body of the message that the student was previously removed from the course and needs to be manually re-enabled by a system administrator. Once complete, any items the student previously created before dropping the course (discussion posts, assignment submissions, etc) will also be restored.

Withdrawn

Students who withdraw from a course after the add/drop deadline has passed are not removed from Blackboard. ‘Withdrawn’ is technically a grading status (WD), not an enrollment status, and so does not affect a student’s Blackboard course enrollment. Additionally, students who have withdrawn from a course are still entitled to access any work, grades/feedback, etc. that were completed before their withdrawal. Blackboard administrators are unable to remove withdrawn students from the course roster.

There are a few steps that instructors can take to handle a withdrawn student who still appears in the course roster:

• The instructor can set up a course grade override code in the gradebook settings and apply it to withdrawn students so they can be easily filtered out or skipped over when reviewing course grades.

• To prevent withdrawn students from accessing potentially sensitive material (such as exams they might be taking in a future semester if they re-attempt the class), the instructor can create a group containing all students except those who have withdrawn and then use release conditions to make sensitive course materials available only to the group, excluding any students who have withdrawn.

• Alternatively, the instructor could use the exceptions feature on an assignment/test to set a custom access date for the withdrawn student(s) to keep the assessment locked until after the semester ends and the course is closed. This feature is only available for graded assessments, not for readings, lectures, tool links, etc.

If you have further questions about managing access to course information for withdrawn students, write to help@syr.edu or book a virtual consultation with an OLS staff member.

Incomplete

Students who receive a grade of Incomplete (I) are expected to coordinate with the instructor to finish the course requirements and resolve their final grade by the end of the following semester. If a student needs to access a Blackboard course from a previous semester for the purposes of resolving an incomplete (or for any other reason), Blackboard system administrators can re-open a past course for an individual student for a fixed amount of time. The instructor of the original course must make the request on the student’s behalf by emailing help@syr.edu and including:

• the course title/number

• student’s name and NetID

• the date range for which access should be restored