Policies and Regulations

Academic Advisors

The program director or their designee will serve as the academic advisor.

Course Registration

Current graduate students may register the first day of registration for any term. Students will complete registration online. ALT PIN numbers will be provided by the academic advisor.

Class schedules and descriptions of the registration procedures can be found online from the Office of the Registrar.

Registration must be completed and all tuition and fees must be paid to the Business Office before published deadlines.

Graduate Courses

Courses at the 600 and 700 levels are offered for graduate credit only. Courses offered at the 600 level may be open to graduate students or to undergraduate seniors who meet specific requirements.

In some instances, courses included in a graduate program may be cross-listed as both an undergraduate and graduate class. In those instances in which undergraduate and graduate students are taking the same course, it is the expectation of Concordia College that course requirements for graduate students will have added rigor that can be easily discerned through an examination of the course syllabus. While the nature of these expectations may vary from course to course, it is assumed that the following categories will usually be the focus for increased rigor. In all cases, additional expectations for graduate students should be clearly identified on the syllabus.

• Higher grading expectations
• Additional assignments, papers and/or projects and/or additional expectations including, but not limited to: more sophisticated topic choices, paper length, number of required sources, expectations for public presentation(s), etc.
• Increased scholarly reading and more sophisticated research/scholarship expectations

Mixed Credit Policy

Students admitted into an approved accelerated graduate program may have a limited number of graduate or post-baccalaureate courses counted toward both an undergraduate and graduate degree as specified by the program's plan of study. Before enrolling in a course to be counted as both undergraduate and graduate credit, the undergraduate student must be accepted into an accelerated graduate program.  The college allows 40% of the total hours required for the graduate degree to be taken as mixed credit, though some programs may have lower limits.  Students must pass these courses with a minimum grade of a C.

Graduate Certificate Credits Applying to Master's Degree

Graduate certificate credits can be applied toward a master’s degree with the following restrictions:

• No more than 50% of credits in a master’s program can be satisfied by graduate certificate credits.
• A capstone/thesis from a certificate program cannot be used to satisfy a capstone/thesis requirement in the master’s program.
• No course taken in the certificate program for which the grade is less than B will be permitted on a Plan of Study for a master’s degree.

Time Limitation

All requirements for the degree must be completed within seven years after taking the first graduate course included in the Plan of Study. If an academic leave is granted, the student is still required to complete all degree requirements within the seven-year time period. In exceptional cases when students need to petition for an extension in order to complete the degree, they should contact the Graduate Programs Committee to initiate an appeal process.

Degree and Graduation Requirements

A minimum of 30 credit hours of graduate level coursework is required. The graduate program shall indicate the type of culminating or capstone experience that shall be required as a condition of progressing to candidacy for the master’s degree. Examples may include a thesis, a professional project, a written or oral comprehensive exam, performance or exhibition, consulting engagement, successful completion of a capstone course, evaluation of a portfolio, or a combination of these, as determined by the program requirements.

Students graduate according to requirements published in the catalog at the time of their matriculation at Concordia. Students who are readmitted two years or more after their last enrollment must satisfy requirements published in the catalog in effect at the time of readmission. Graduate students are expected to read and adhere to the values and responsibilities of Academic Integrity.

Graduate students are expected to comply with the general Academic Policies of Concordia College.

Academic Integrity

The Concordia community expects all of our members to act with integrity – to act with honesty, uprightness and sincerity. Every member of our academic community is charged with the responsibility of encouraging and maintaining an environment of academic integrity. Faculty are especially important in this regard: they should be models of academic integrity and foster an understanding of its importance and principles. Faculty are responsible for providing students with a syllabus within three class sessions. This syllabus serves as a contract between faculty and students and specifies the expectations of academic integrity, identifies what constitutes as academic misconduct, delineates consequences for academic integrity violations, and states that violations will be reported. Faculty are responsible for adhering to the goals of the course, the assessments of student learning, and fair grading. Students are responsible both for their own integrity and for engendering a respect for its values in their peers, values that apply to all their academic activities.

Although the area of academic integrity is commonly considered to be the province of faculty and students, the responsibility for academic integrity reaches beyond these groups. Because many staff may interact with students as they complete their course assignments, our integrity expectations for staff mirror those for faculty. We recognize that faculty and staff may also violate integrity. In instances involving faculty, the individual detecting a violation should contact the department chair or program director, or in cases involving department chairs or program directors, the Dean of the College/designee or the Dean of Graduate Studies/designee. For cases in which staff violate academic integrity, the supervisor of the staff member should be contacted. All employees of the college are further bound by the contractual responsibilities and consequences specified in the Faculty or Staff Handbooks, which can be consulted for further details about handling academic integrity violations.

The full Academic Integrity Policy is available at this link.