Important Policy Clarifications

Core Curriculum

• Waiving the Core for transfer students:
  • The Office of Admissions does not consider dual-enrollment courses (college credits taken while in high school or the summer immediately following high school graduation) as transferred courses. Thus the Core Curriculum exemption for students with 30+ transferred hours (i.e., the waiver of FYS and one CT course) may be applied only to students who transfer 30+ post-high school credits from another institution.
    • Example: A student graduates from high school in May 2016. While in high school, the student earns 24 dual-enrollment credits at Bluefield State. In Summer 2016, the student earns 6 credits at WV State. With 30 credits, the student will still matriculate at Marshall in Fall 2016 as a first-time freshman and must complete the entire Core. Full-time enrollment in college is new to this student; enrollment in UNI 100 and participation in WOW would also be appropriate and expected.
• Critical Thinking “CT” Courses
  • The CT designation refers both to skills-based learning outcomes and the pedagogical practices employed by trained Marshall faculty, not content-based learning outcomes. For this reason, the CT requirement cannot be met by transferred courses.
  • A course before the CT designation was added (PSY 200: Intro Psych) and the same course after the CT designation was added (PSY 200: Intro Psych [CT]) are not course equivalents. The learning outcomes have changed to include additional skills-based outcomes. Students get credit for meeting the CT requirement only if they enroll in a course after the attribute was added.

Repeat Passing Grade

Assume that no class may be taken twice for credit toward graduation unless the individual department authorizes it. Please note that Degree Works does not screen out duplicate classes. Clarifications of past practice:

• Nearly all courses at Marshall may not be counted more than once toward 120 required graduation credits.  The following are a few that elicit the most confusion:
  • UNI 201: Peer Mentoring
  • PEL courses
  • A foreign language course taken abroad that transfers back as a course the student has already completed at (or transferred to) Marshall
• Courses for which each passing attempt does count toward 120 required hours toward graduation include:
  • Special topics courses and research courses (with permission of chair, certifying that the topic has not been duplicated)
  • Independent Study
  • Clinical Hours
  • Certain Music courses (determined by CAM)

Additional Baccalaureate Degrees

It is possible to earn more than one baccalaureate degree by meeting these requirements:

• Completing all of the major and minor requirements for the desired additional baccalaureate degree;
• Completing a minimum of 30 additional hours beyond the 120 required for a first baccalaureate degree. This means completing a total of 150 hours for a second baccalaureate (180 for a third baccalaureate, and so on).
• Meeting the minimum residency requirement of 24 credit hours.