Students who follow strict religious practices on certain days of the year can now focus on upholding their faith without worrying about their class attendance.
The N.C. General Assembly recently passed a law asking K-12 public schools and
UNC-system schools to implement a policy outlining the rules and guidelines for excused absences for religious purposes.
At their August meeting, the
UNC-system Board of Governors decided to allow individual campuses in the system to come up with their own guidelines for allowing such absences.
Although it will allow students to celebrate religious festivals, administrators are still working out the details of the policy and are worried about how it might impact students’ exam schedules.
At
UNC-CH, students must notify instructors two weeks in advance of any religious observance they will observe, said Ron Strauss, executive associate provost.
Administrators will not question written notifications or the students’ faith, but they do expect students to uphold the Honor Code, Strauss said.
“We hope that students approach this with integrity and use it for its intention,” he said.
“The only place it gets dicey is during exams.”
According to the new policy, students are asked to notify instructors by the last day of classes if their religious observation runs into conflict with an exam. The months of May and December, which is the time for fall and spring semster finals, also happen to be the months during which many religious holidays fall.
Teachers are to accommodate these excused absences with makeup work or tests, but many worry that this could pose problems for fair grading.
Michael Salemi, a professor of economics at
UNC, said he hasn’t allowed alternative tests for missed midterms in the past.
“My policy has been and would continue to be that I do not know how to give a fair makeup exam,” Salemi said.
He also said it’s hard to write equally difficult exams.
“What we have here is where students will have to balance the requirements of their faith against their desire for the quality of their education,” Salemi said.
If students request more than two days of excused absences, UNC’s policy gives the jurisdiction to the instructor, Strauss said.
Salemi said he would continue his policy of increasing the weight of the final exam for those students who miss midterm tests due to excused absences.
Sana Khan, president of the Muslim Students Association at
UNC-CH, said the new law will help Muslim students celebrate the two main holidays of the year that fall on the same day as classes.
“It’s a little bit of a balancing act between holidays and class,” Khan said.
“It’s a step forward for people to begin thinking about the fact that it does affect students around the holidays.”
N.C. State University’s policy also requires notification of the religious observance before it occurs.
John Ambrose, the interim dean of undergraduate academic programs at
NCSU, said he was worried that the new policy would interfere with students’ exam schedules.
“If they are in a religion that has an observance, we would expect them to know when the observance is,” Ambrose said.
NCSU has compiled a list of religious holidays in order to map out potential absences from students, he said.
“I certainly hope it doesn’t force the instructors to come up with alternative exams,” Ambrose said.
“We’re figuring this out as we go along.”
Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.
