DID YOU KNOW that you can lose all of your financial aid if you don’t achieve good
Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP)? What is it, and what do you have
to do in order to achieve Satisfactory Academic Progress?
In accordance with federal regulations all financial aid recipients are required
to make Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) towards their degree and be in
good academic standing in order to remain eligible to receive financial aid. In
other words, you must achieve a certain number of credits over a period of
time, called “pace”, and a certain cumulative GPA (cGPA) each year. At
the end of the spring term, the Financial Aid Office will check your academic
transcript to make sure that you have achieved the required pace/cumulative GPA
and are not on academic probation. If you do not make satisfactory
academic progress then you will not be eligible to receive financial aid for
the next school year until you are in good standing. All financial aid
including federal student loans, federal parent loans, grants, scholarships,
and work study are subject to meeting the minimum SAP standards set by the
university.
For example, SAP for a full time day student is defined as successful completion of
24 credits in a single academic year, September to May, while maintaining the
correct cGPA and Pace. Let’s look at each
component separately.
A full time day student must successfully complete 24 credits per academic year. Successful completion of a course is defined
as the receipt of a final letter grade, ranging from A+ to D-. You will be considered in bad Satisfactory
Academic Progress if you do not complete the full amount of credits required
each academic year. Even if you have a 4.0 cumulative GPA, you can still be
placed on bad SAP if you earned less than 24 credits for the year.
Fall earned 12 credits + Spring earned 12 credits = 24 Total earned credits = 🙂
Fall earned 9 credits + Spring earned 15 credits = 24 Total earned credits = 🙂
Fall earned 9 credits + Spring earned 12 credits = 21 Total earned credits = 🙁 !!!!!!!
A Withdrawal, Did Not Attend, Incomplete, or an “F” in a course is not considered
completion, and the student will not receive credit. These marks are, however,
still considered attempted credits even though the course was not completed and
no letter grade was received. This falls under another branch of SAP, known as “Pace”.
In order to have good Pace, you NEED to earn at least 67% of the credits attempted during your ENTIRE COLLEGE CAREER INCLUDING TRANSFER CREDITS, SUMMER COURSES, INTERSESSION COURSES, ETC. For example, imagine that you are an exceptionally good first year student and decided to take 20 credits for the
Fall semester and 20 credits for the Spring semester. This is a total of 40 attempted credits for the entire year. Part way through the semester you realized that
the workload of all those courses is too much and you need to maintain a 4.0 cGPA (because you are such a great student!), so you decide to withdraw from a few
of your courses so that you are now taking only 12 credits per semester. Therefore at the end of the year you still complete a total of 24 credits for the entire
year. You might think that you are still in good SAP because you have earned the 24 credits required for each year and you have achieved a 4.0 cumulative GPA.
However, this is not the case. You MUST remember that you attempted a total of 40 credits, but only earned 24 of those credits, which means that you have only earned 60% of your attempted credits. This puts you in bad Pace, which means you are also in bad SAP and will not receive any financial aid from the school. If you have withdrawn, failed or did not attend courses you should check the amount of credits earned versus the amount of credits attempted to make sure that you have earned at least 67% of your credits attempted.
__Credits earned__ = 67% or higher
Credits attempted In addition, students are also required to maintain a minimum cumulative grade point average (cGPA) in accordance with the number of credits attempted. In
order to maintain good satisfactory academic progress, you must meet the following requirements to be in good SAP and to keep your financial aid: if you have attempted 3-27 credits =
cGPA of 1.75 or greater
- if you have attempted 28-57 credits = cGPA of 1.85 or greater
- if you have attempted 58 or more credits = cGPA of 2.0 or greater
A student’s academic progress is reviewed at the end of each spring term. The Financial Aid Office will mail a letter to each student who fails to maintain the minimum academic
progress standards detailing their deficiencies and the steps for reinstating their financial aid eligibility.
What if you won’t have the necessary cGPA and the right amount of credits by the end of the academic year in May? One thing you can do is enroll in a summer course to
bring your grade up and/or earn the credits you need for good SAP. If you choose to do this, you must be sure to update your transcripts through the school’s Registrar’s Office. Then you need to inform the Financial Aid Office that you are in good SAP. They will check up on all your information, and if you are in good SAP, you will be reconsidered for financial aid. If you are
interested in taking a course outside of the University of New Haven, you must first check with the Registrar’s Office. You should ask them if that the course you take will transfer and appear on your transcript in such a way as to help you achieve good SAP. For example, if you are taking a 3 credit course, make sure that the Registrar’s Office will put it on your transcript as a 3 credit course. However, if your SAP problem revolves around your cumulative GPA, then you must make sure that your course will transfer in as a grade that affects your cGPA.
If Satisfactory Academic Progress is something you are concerned about, the first thing you should do is talk to the Financial Aid Office to see what options are available to you. So remember to keep your grades up, make sure you have at least 24 credits by the end of each year if you are a full time student, and have earned at least 67% of your credits attempted, and you will achieve good SAP!
