Sometimes you may not be able to finish all required work for a course before the end of the semester. In this case, you may ask the instructor to give you the grade Incomplete (I). Once the missing work is completed, the instructor will convert your Incomplete into a proper grade for the course (either a letter grade or Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory).
Incompletes sound like a great tool to manage your workload, but they can also be risky. If you are considering asking for an Incomplete, keep the following points in mind.
Instructors cannot decide to simply give a student an Incomplete due to missing work. Incompletes must be explicitly requested by the student. Unless you ask your instructor for an Incomplete, they are supposed to give you a normal grade. This means that they might have to give you a low grade because you have not finished all the work.
According to university regulations, an Incomplete automatically converts to an F at the end of the next semester. For example, if you get an Incomplete for a seminar in the Fall, you have until the end of Spring to finish the remaining work so that your instructor can give you a proper grade. If you still have an Incomplete at the end of Spring, the “I” will automatically change to an “F” (specifically, the grade “I/F”, which means “F due to unresolved Incomplete”). Getting rid of this F is difficult and involves petitioning the Graduate School for permission to retake the course, with the new grade overriding your old one. In the meantime, if this F ends up lowering your GPA below 3.0, the university will put you on academic probation.
Due to the automatic conversion to an F, you have at most one semester to take care of an Incomplete. However, the instructor has the right to set an earlier deadline. In particular, the Department encourages its faculty to use the beginning of the next semester as the deadline for Incompletes, rather than the end of the next semester.
This recommendation is the result of several problems encountered by students with Incompletes. For one thing, students with an Incomplete on their transcript cannot change status. This means that they cannot change status from G3 to G4 at the end of year 1, and they cannot advance to candidacy as this means changing status from G4 to G5. Both of these are very bad situations to be in. If you cannot change status from G3 to G4, then you may still have to take 12 credits of course work — but since your Graduate Tuition Scholarship for years 2 and higher only covers 9 credits per semester, you would be billed for the extra 3 credits. And if you cannot advance to candidacy, then you have to keep taking regular classes and cannot enroll in Dissertation Research.
Besides the status adjustment problems, there are also the psychological effects of an Incomplete. Heading into a new semester with an Incomplete dangling over your head is nerve wrecking. And you might well end up with yet another Incomplete because finishing the Incomplete from the previous semester took up so much time that you couldn’t finish all your term papers for this semester. It quickly becomes a vicious cycle that is difficult to break. You are much better off taking care of your Incompletes before the next semester starts.
The university automatically converts any and all Incompletes to Fs at the end of the next semester, and this happens even if you are on leave during that semester. But it is also university regulation that students on leave may not complete any university work, which means that your instructor cannot change your Incomplete while you are on leave. So if you get an Incomplete in one semester and then go on leave in the next semester, you are by default headed for an F. The only way to avoid this is for the instructor(!) to submit a request to extend the Incomplete deadline by one semester. Most instructors are not aware of this, and they may not even know that you are on leave. If you find yourself in this situation, make sure to keep the GPD and the instructor in the loop so that they can take all the necessary administrative steps. Otherwise, you may suddenly find yourself with an F when you come back from your leave. Or even worse, the F may have lowered your GPA so much that the Graduate School denies your request to return from your leave.
As you can see from all the above, Incompletes must be handled with great care.