A sign marks an entrance to the UTC campus.Students at UTC are being told to retake classes they may not need to repeat and, in some cases, fork over more money for the added courses.
Academic officials at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga said they won’t tell all students that the grades now required in some classes aren’t the ones agreed to when the students enrolled.
“That would be like yelling fire in a crowded theater,” said UTC Provost Phil Oldham. “We discovered that exiting students weren’t prepared for upper-level classes. Faculty studied it. A number of students were getting into upper-level classes and having to take them over and over and over.”
But some parents are outraged. They say the administration is secretly tinkering with requirements, hoping students won’t ask questions about it.
Two parents said their sons, both juniors who made C’s in their entry-level accounting classes – the minimum requirement based on guidelines in the school course catalog – were told by their advisers that they would have to retake the classes to make a B.