Before the semester can officially end and become a thing of the past, grades have to be released and available for students. Otherwise they will still reminisce and be on edge on how they performed that semester.

That anxious feeling can really disrupt the peace of mind because you desperately want to know how you did. The quicker you know the better because your grades dictates how you schedule classes in the future. Pace tries to help ease the conscious a little bit by telling students to fill out course evaluations.

The course evaluations are not mandatory to fill out but if you do fill them out, students get their grades on time. Should a student fail to fill them out, their grades would be stalled for a couple of extra days. This is a tricky predicament because there is no set time or day that grades being released “on time” come out. So if a student doesn’t fill out a course evaluation, they don’t really know how long they’ll be waiting for their grades.

There should be a specific number of days after the semester is over that grades be submitted by professors and posted on the Pace Portal. There should also be a specific time and day after for students who didn’t fill out course evaluations to get their grades. Either way, students should be informed when their grades will be released to them, especially since they’re the ones who worked for them.

Guessing when the grades will come out is too stressful and for a lot of students who rely on scholarships to pay for their tuition, most of them require that you maintain a certain GPA.  The quicker you find out what the GPA is the quicker you can plan out what your financial status will be for the next semester.

Students can apply for new scholarships at the end of the semester and to attach a transcript is usually asked for. If the grades aren’t submitted, then the transcript can’t be obtained and the scholarship can’t be applied for.

There is a domino effect for every decision that is made when grades aren’t submitted and released by a certain time. There should definitely be a set time and day when grades are released to students. It should not matter if they filled out course evaluations or not because those grades not only show how that student did that semester, but it also affects the semesters and decisions to come in the future.