Some colleges and universities, including Rutgers U. and Penn State U., are reaching out to former students who left school before completing a degree. Offering academic forgiveness programs, the schools allow students to erase their previous GPA and start over with a clean slate.

Earl Hawkey, director of the U. of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Registration and Records, said UNL offers similar programs. However, unlike other universities’ programs which only offer academic forgiveness to returning dropouts, UNL’s program allows any student to reset their GPA.

“Some programs are based on the fact that a student has to leave before they can gain access to academic forgiveness. They have to be gone a certain amount of time first. The period varies. It can be eight or nine years, or just one or two,” Hawkey said. “The other type of program, which is what we have here, doesn’t require students to be gone for any length of time.”

Hawkey points to two programs in particular that returning UNL students with low grade point averages can take advantage of. The first is called academic bankruptcy. It allows a student to declare up to two terms as “bankrupt,” so all courses and credits in those terms are taken out of the GPA equation and do not count toward a degree requirement. The courses do still appear on the transcript, but are marked as academically bankrupt.

In order to qualify for this a student must either complete 15 credit hours with at least a 3.0 GPA, or 30 hours with at least a 2.5 GPA after the bankrupt semester.

Hawkey said this option is useful for students who had one or two bad semesters, but expect to do better.

“It’s a policy where a student needs to show that their performance in the term they want to bankrupt is not consistent with their abilities,” he said.

Another option Hawkey mentioned is repeating a course. If a student takes a course and gets a grade lower than a C, that student may retake the course for a higher grade. The original grade still appears on the transcript, but is taken out of the GPA calculation. There is no limit to the number of times a student may repeat courses.

Sean Kenney is one student who plans to take advantage of these programs to raise his GPA. A former general studies major, he dropped out of UNL after his freshman year and plans to return in the spring semester of 2011. He said he thinks UNL’s repeat policy is just as useful to him as the academic forgiveness programs of other universities’ would be.

“The classes that make my GPA lower are classes I’m planning to retake anyway for my degree,” he said.

He hopes to use the option of repeating courses to help raise his GPA, which will have several benefits for him.

“I screwed around for my first year and my parents told me they wouldn’t fund screwing around,” Kenney said. “I’m going back this spring semester with my own money. If I get my GPA up above a 3.0, my parents will pay for the rest.”