<p>My D contracted a very severe virus coupled with probable exhaustion just at finals of Freshman first semester. She ended up collapsing and being admitted to emergency unit of hospital for almost a week. We assumed that the college knew she was hospitalized but apparently they only knew she was sick. She emailed her professors. Anyway the result was a 2.0 or thereabouts. Anyway, this year has started much better and she will have around a 3.5+ for the first semester sophomore year. Any suggestions? Or should she just suck it up and move on.</p>
<p>Recourse in what sense? It was already a year ago. If there were classes she failed perhaps she can take them again to up her grade, depending on college policy and whether she has already passed them by material-wise.</p>
<p>A year ago it may have been possible to defer the finals through official channels. However, at this point she probably needs to move on. (Unless your college happens to have a grade forgiveness policy which erases a low grade from the transcript when the class gets retaken.)</p>
<p>Suck it up and move on. Too much time has passed.</p>
<p>I agree-she should have taken care of this last year after it happened. How would the college know she was in the hospital if she didn’t let anyone know and even if they did they aren’t going to automatically do anything for her, she would have needed to set up a plan with them. She probably could have filed for a medical extension for her tests, etc. but not any longer. If they question comes up in a job interview, she can tell them what happened.</p>
<p>Many colleges allow retakes for classes in which a student got a C- or lower (non-transferrable grade). This might slow down her time to degree and cost more, but it may be helpful to get her out of a GPA hole. Is the 3.5 her overall GPA or just her semester GPA? Your D should check her school’s catalog policy on retakes. Grade changes for previously taken courses are generally not done a year out.</p>
<p>Yes I agree she and by extension I should have been more on top of this. We kinda assumed they would allow a retake of the one course she received a D in but never assume. Her 3.5 is this one semester only but she is taking 22 units and if she keeps it up she will get over a 3.0 when she graduates. My feelings at the time and still are that she is healthy. Plus that $41k hospital bill threw me for a loop as well since we live 3000 miles away</p>
<p>Wow! That is a big bill. I hope your insurance covered the bulk of it. I just had an experience with my son getting a high fever, and since student health was closed, his roommates took him to the hospital instead. He did not bring his insurance card (we waived the health plan offered through the university because he’s on our plan) so now I am dealing with the bills. I am fairly confident that insurance will cover it, but we’ve been billed $700 for the emergency room visit. Remind your kids, if you’ve waived insurance through the school, to carry their health insurance cards!!</p>
<p>What do you mean when you say " My feelings at the time and still are that she is healthy."</p>
<p>If she was in the hospital for a week (as opposed to the college infirmary), she was pretty seriously ill.</p>
<p>I cannot imagine assuming that the college knew that my child was in the hospital. But I have a child with chronic health problems and am used to negotiating the system. Never, ever, deal only with professors when health is involved. A backup administrator and documentation are always required.</p>
<p>There is a wide range of responses from different colleges to situations like this, including anything from a requirement to withdraw and reapply after two weeks absence from class, for instance, to extensions and incompletes that allow a student who was ill, to fully catch up at the level he or she is entitled to.</p>
<p>Your daughter should have gotten documentation of the health crisis and hospitalization, to an administrator responsible for accommodating such situations, asap. It is still possible to get that documentation, or, perhaps, you have it (even the bill would be a help). An MD would have to be involved in advocacy.</p>
<p>Did your daughter take finals? Or miss them? Or make some of them up? (Often finals have make-ups: did she look into this?) Did she have papers due that she could not do? Did she miss actual classes? Did she do work in the hospital and e-mail professors while there, expressing a desire to keep up or make up? Was she still too ill to work when she got out?</p>
<p>At the very least, the low grades could be expunged from her record if you and your daughter meet with an administrator about what happened. This is NOT the college’s fault. Your daughter - and you- did not follow simple steps that might have rescued things.</p>
<p>Overall, colleges are not legally required to accommodate at the level of public high schools. The accommodations need to be “reasonable”, and cannot affect academic standards or cause undue financial or administrative burdens for the school.</p>
<p>However, schools often are concerned that students succeed. If you meet with someone in administration (a dean, most likely), you and your daughter could discuss with him or her the best way to approach this. It might be possible to drop the low grades and even get a refund (I am assuming though that you did not pay for tuition refund insurance).</p>
<p>Also, when she was in the hospital, after the admission, did you check into the insurance situation? Is there any way that can be dealt with? I am afraid that you are dealing with that in the same kind of passive way: fight! (Along with my kid’s issues, I also just spent two years fighting for my husband’s disability after a stroke: the key was to not get worn down and keep going when they denied or said no. We won.)</p>
<p>I have to spend my life being on top of this stuff so it is hard to read your post and understand. But putting myself in your shoes I guess I can see how you would have made some assumptions. Just know, going forward, that the world is not that competent and noone looks after you and yours except for you. It is always better to do too much, rather than too little. Don’t just suck it up and move on. At least try. Good luck.</p>
<p>Yes I was no where near assertive enough in taking control of things. After she became acutely ill, she had complaints of severe nausea and headaches for about a week prior, an instructor called an ambulance and she was admitted to the children’s hospital ER. She kept insisting she was just tired and the doctors did not really know what was wrong. She had some indications of a pituitary enlargement but that has never been explained. The following summer she retook the problem class and received a B+. We thought they would average it out or replace it with the D. No luck. She would have taken the class over no matter what even w/o credit since she felt she couldn’t concentrate on the subject the first time. I do have insurance that paid after the fact and she says she did provide medical records and doctor plans to freshman dean. I will think about this more and decide if I should talk to admin myself. I do not hold the college responsible, just trying to see if anyone had tackled this sort of thing before</p>
<p>Are you saying that the college allowed her to retake the class but did not substitute the new grade for the old grade? Did they give her credit for the retake? Did she take the class at a different institution and the primary institution decided not to accept it?</p>
<p>If, say, she retook the class at a CC over the summer, then her grade would not transfer, because grades aren’t transferable among institutions. Only credits are.</p>
<p>Some schools also do not allow grade substitution but just add in the new grade. It sounds like that might be the case here.</p>
<p>Students need to realize that as soon as they have a problem they need to start working on trying to salvage whatever they can from their academic situation. I have a student this semester who disappeared from class for over two weeks. She missed an exam and numerous homework assignments. There was no word from her, despite the ease of sending emails through the campus system. After 18 days she sent an email saying she had been in the hospital and asking if she could make up the exam. I have not allowed her to do so. At this point, she will almost certainly fail the course. I don’t know if she will make some appeal to the College or whether they would support her or not. I’m going to wait and see.</p>
<p>OTOH, in a course some years ago one of the students contracted meningitis and was in a coma. While his parents were waiting to learn whether he would live or die, his mother contacted me on my cell phone attempting to do what she could to salvage his education if he survived (to my knowledge he did, but I have no idea whether he ever returned to school or when).</p>
<p>sylvan,</p>
<p>Just out of curiosity, is your refusal to retake the test based on the time that lapsed or that two weeks out of any semester is just too much to make up? I am asking this as a parent who has been very fortunate to not deal with a major health issue with a college aged child. Personally, if my child was in a major health situation, I think I certainly would have the thought process to make phone calls or send an email or two. I am also educated enough to realize that not every parent is like that and if this young adult didn’t have access to a computer or phone while hospitalized, maybe she is contacting you at the first available moment. So this is no way judging for your decision, I am just honestly curious the thought process.</p>
<p>Thanks,
CS</p>
<p>^First, it does state in the course syllabus the policy for missed exams:
The student in question failed to notify me before the exam or in fact until over a week after the exam. I know that she has people, so even if she were unable to email me herself, she could presumably have instructed them as to how to do so. My feeling is that, first, the policy is in the syllabus. Second, if she cared so little (apparently) that she could not email or arrange for someone else to contact me, I see no reason to spend the 4 hours it would take for me to write another exam, proctor it, and grade it.</p>
<p>Collegeshopping, I do pretty much the same thing as Sylvan. The problem is that so many kids claim “health issues” as an excuse for missing exams, deadlines, etc. that sorting out the real from the not-so-real becomes impossible – as does making decisions on what to accept as legitimate and what not to. A few years ago, I had a student tell me she missed the final because she was in the hospital. Ok, fine. Show me a bill, your dismissal papers, something. Then, no, wait, she was in the hospital all night with her grandmother . . . You just get to the point where you can’t believe what you’re told and you don’t feel qualified to make the call as to what is an acceptable health issue. So, you make policies and stick to them rigidly. </p>
<p>A student with a major health emergency should never go directly to a professor. Go to the disability office for disabilities (and no, short term illnessess, even if they last a week or two, are not disabilities) and the student or academic dean for others for acute illness, hospitalizations, real deaths in the family (don’t get me started on those).</p>
<p>I’m not sure what you expect to have happen a full year after the fact. Your daughter did retake that course, and this will show on her college transcript. She can easily explain why the course appears twice on her transcript if need be.</p>
<p>I will speak from experience…and I was also 3000 miles away. We did nothing to help our kiddo except to make sure a close relative went to be with her. In our case, it was second quarter senior year. DD was admitted to the hospital and spent a week there AND had two additional weeks of restricted activities due to two surgeries. HOWEVER, DD sent an email when she was admitted to the dean of students, her advisor, and to each professor. The dean of students was most helpful. She did have to drop one class but took it the following term.</p>
<p>I think you may need to move on from this.</p>
<p>My D faced a health related issue as a first semester freshman, not to the severity of your D’s but she did learn a lot from it. Like the poster, we did not realize the severity of her health situation until it was too late and she failed a class. She arrived home with bacterial pneumonia AND mono and an enlarged kidney the day her finals were over (based on emergency doctor’s assessment) and it took the entire break and then into the next semester for her to recover. (It is possible to have both, believe it or not.)</p>
<p>Although she was extremely sick, she did not do anything about it at the time. For example, a professor walked up to her while she was in the middle taking a final and expressed concern about how sick she appeared and asked her if she would LIKE to postpone the final! She thanked them, but took the final anyway! Another final was right after that and at that point, she could barely make it through the exam. The professor was out having a baby (and had a sub for the last several classes prior) so she took the final sick as a dog. Sure enough, she failed. The school policy - fail the final - automatic class failure. During break, she went to the Dean and e-mailed the professor and explained her situation - she had the medical records to prove her illness. No recourse. She took a gamble - she wasn’t really expecting much but at least she faced up to the consequences. She took it again at a CC and transferred in an A, which did not obviously get factored into her GPA but fulfilled the requirement.The F did remain on the transcript but was removed from the GPA. </p>
<p>Ironically her roommate was hospitalized the night before a final the second semester. She was pretty sick and they wanted to keep her longer, but she got up the next morning without sleeping at all, left the hospital, took a cab back to school and got an A on her Physiology final. She then went home and was admitted back into the hospital where it was discovered she had Lyme Disease.</p>
<p>Is there a moral to the story? I guess sometimes you just have to accept that things happen in life. Sometimes kids learn lessons in the School of Hard Knocks. It’s your D’s lesson to learn unfortunately though.</p>
<p>I disagree and know of instances when things have been fixed some time later. </p>
<p>The professors on here who will not go easy on a student who has absolute proof of a hospital stay (and yes, including after the fact) have maybe been hardened a little too much by years of teaching. My kid goes to an Ivy and has high standards for herself, but she has met with accommodations and kindness many times in these circumstances. However, she did do her part in terms of communication, and she is known to have the kind of character described in kids by other posters, the type who leaves the hospital in a cab to get to the exam.</p>
<p>If the poster’s daughter took the class over again, it should be a simple matter to replace the old grade. The parent should get involved in this, meet with the dean or whomever,with the daughter, and bring the documentation. At this point, a professor is not involved and it is more a matter for an administrator and the registrar. It is neither administratively nor financially burdensome for the college to do this.</p>
<p>I think it is unreasonable to expect a kid who is in the hospital to make communicating a priority overall. It is easy to understand that a student and family would be focused on the health crisis and leave comparatively trivial matters like grades for afterward. Those dealing with chronic issues know better, but if this is an acute illness, they are less likely to know they need to take care of things even in the midst of crisis in the hospital.</p>
<p>I am not sure I can agree. Her D is in college. Grades and classes are never “trivial” even when stacked up against a serious illness. What will happen when she is on the job in the real world? She will face hardships and she will have to deal with them and follow the lines of communication with her employer if she takes a leave from the job, even while she is sick.</p>
<p>A year has passed. While it is very unfortunate for your D, she did already retake the class over the summer and the school has a policy in place about how they will rectify the situation. Why are you asking now after another semester has passed? Why didn’t she get this resolved in the summer right after she retook the class and received the B+?</p>