Students may request the Fall 2020 at-home semester option through August 30 by emailing registrar@uvm.edu. Submissions should include a justification for the request, and will be considered on a case-by-case basis. If your request is granted, you will be sent a link to the at-home election form. First and second year students who have chosen the at-home option are only released from the Fall 2020 on-campus residency requirement if they reside in their permanent residences this fall. Contracts for Fall 2020 housing and meal plans will be canceled by the Division of Student Affairs without penalty, and financial aid will be adjusted to reflect reduced housing and meal costs for students who were scheduled or required to live on campus. Requests submitted after the July 23 deadline will not be eligible for the free 3-credit Summer 2021 course.

To help you with your decision-making process, the UVMStrong Fall 2020 Advisory Committee will be offering an information session on Teams Live:

• New Students and Families: Wednesday, July 8 from 7:00-8:30PM EDT at https://go.uvm.edu/covidinfonewstudents
• Returning Students and Families: Thursday, July 9 from 7:00-8:30PM EDT at https://go.uvm.edu/covidinfostudents

Recordings of the sessions will be posted as they become available.

The deadline was 11:59 pm EDT on Friday, July 17.

Fill out the At-Home Option for Fall 2020 Election Form to indicate that you wish to choose the Fall 2020 at-home option. If you are under the age of 18, you will need to return a scanned copy of the form that includes a parent/guardian signature to the Registrar's Office.

All at-home students must complete the COVID-19 Health and Safety Training and make the Green and Gold Promise. Even though at-home students will not come to campus this semester, the health and safety training and the Green and Gold Promise contain useful information that can be applied to your daily activities regardless of learning location. Some sections or points of the Green and Gold Promise that refer to on-campus rules will not apply directly to your at-home situation. However, this promise to care for your health, the health of those around you, and the health of your community reflects Common Ground Values of respect, responsibility, and integrity that we ask all Catamounts to uphold, especially during this time.

Please complete your training before the first day of classes on August 31 by reviewing detailed instructions and accessing the training. At-home students who do not complete the health and safety training and Green and Gold Promise by August 31 will be subject to account holds that will preclude the ability to conduct necessary campus business and access important services. The account hold will be lifted as soon as the training is completed.

Students who choose the at-home option are expected to be learning from their primary home. They will not have CATcard access to on-campus facilities, and will not be able to register for classes with required in-person instruction or experiences.

A similar option available to graduate students is called the Remote Option. Details and a form to request recognition of a remote fall semester can be found here:

     https://www.uvm.edu/registrar/forms/remote_grad

All students who are registered for fall courses are required to comply with the mandatory student testing protocol. All students includes all employees who are also students.

Exemptions from the protocol:

An exemption from the protocol for graduate students is possible if all your courses are remote or online and there are no other activities for which you need to be on campus.

Undergraduate students are exempted from the protocol if you have an approved At-Home designation.

Non-degree students may be exempted from the protocol if all your courses are remote or online and there are no other activities for which you need to be on campus.

Employees (does not include Work-Study, Temp student employees, GTA/GRA/GA, or Predoctoral trainee) whose courses are remote or online may opt out of required testing only if:

• You are able to telework 100% of the time, and are not coming to a UVM facility for any reason; or
• You are only coming to a UVM facility for work, and agree that you will not participate in any on-campus activities or go to any UVM facilities unless doing so is directly related to your work. This means, for example, that you may not opt out of testing if you go to the library, meet in-person with a professor or advisor, or participate in an in-person group project with other students.

The revised schedule will indicate which classes are fully online (asynchronous) or remote (synchronous, with live streaming lectures), and will be posted July 13. Changes will continue to be made to the schedule after July 13, so please check the schedule throughout the week. Please refer to revised instructional modes for Fall 2020 for more information about which courses are available for students choosing this option.

Most students choosing the at-home option will need to change one or more courses to ensure that all of their classes can be taken remotely. Students should double-check their schedules and be prepared to make changes during the priority registration period for at-home students (beginning July 20). Please check the registration schedule to find out when you can make changes. On July 23, any at-home student who remains registered in an in-person or mixed course will be dis-enrolled from the course. Students who had received overrides allowing them to register for in-person (INPR) or mixed (MIXD) courses will not be dis-enrolled from these courses.

Beginning July 13, you can use the look up classes to add feature on the Registrar page in myUVM and search for the following attributes: ATHM, ONL, REMT. Please note that ATHM sections will continually be added throughout the week of July 13, so make sure you check back regularly. Please refer to revised instructional modes for Fall 2020 for more information about which courses are available for students choosing this option.

You can find this information on the Registrar page in myUVM. Click on the check registration status (view holds) link in the Your Courses section. Choose Fall 2020 as the term and you will see the available times when you can make changes to your registration. Please be sure to allow 24 hours from the time you submit the At-Home Option form for your registration times to update appropriately.

It depends. Some courses will be available with remote or online lab, studio, and experiential components, but others will not be available. Courses that can be taken remotely will have remote section options. If you are in a program that requires clinical or practicum experiences this fall, you should check with your Dean’s Office about remote options.

Before electing the at-home option for Fall 2020, students should consider possible impacts on their progress towards their degrees. While most students will be able to recreate a schedule that includes electives and other courses that fulfill either general education requirements, major, or minor requirements, students whose programs require extensive lab, experiential, clinical, or practical coursework may not be able to replicate their original schedule if they choose the at-home option. Students are responsible for understanding the impact of their new schedules on their progress towards their degrees.

If you submit the form electing the at-home option and later change your mind, we will do our best to accommodate your in-person return to campus in the fall. We cannot guarantee the availability of on-campus housing or individual on-campus/in-person courses should you revoke your at-home election. It will also take time to revise any financial aid award you may receive based on a change from the at-home option to on-campus option. In addition, you will be required to follow the COVID-19 testing and quarantine protocols. If you need to change your decision and would like to be an on-campus student in the fall, please email the Registrar's Office as soon as possible and requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Students looking to defer or take a GAP year should submit their requests in writing to DeferEnrollment@uvm.edu. The request should include details about the reason for the deferral and also details about the timeline (i.e., is the request to defer for a year or a semester?).

Students can typically expect to hear from the Office of Admissions via email regarding the status of their requests within two business days.

Students who formally defer an offer of admission will retain their original merit scholarship offer.

First year students choosing the at-home option will be able to participate in their Learning Community course and other activities designed to enhance connections between members of each residential learning community.

Continuing students interested in taking a Leave of Absence should contact the Student Services office within their college/school in order to discuss their options and to complete required paperwork.

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: calsstudentservices@uvm.edu
College of Arts and Sciences: cas@uvm.edu
College of Education and Social Sciences: cessstsv@uvm.edu
College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences: cems.student.services@uvm.edu
College of Nursing and Health Sciences: cnhs@uvm.edu
Grossman School of Business: gsbcss@uvm.edu
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources: rsenrss@uvm.edu

University Merit Scholarships generally require that students maintain continuous, full-time enrollment and a minimum cumulative GPA of at least 3.00. However, students may take an approved leave of absence for up to two consecutive semesters and retain merit scholarship eligibility provided they continue to meet all other eligibility requirements. Only terms in which you actually receive a scholarship payment count toward the 8 semester maximum scholarship eligibility limit.

Learn more about how a leave of absence impacts financial aid, scholarships, and student loan repayment.

Please refer to the following for more information about how a leave of absence may impact financial aid, scholarships, and loan repayment.

Yes – first and second-year students who choose this option will be able to live in on-campus housing in Spring 2021.

There will be no change in academic year 2020-21 tuition or comprehensive fees for students who choose the at-home option. Financial aid awards for students who were scheduled or required to live on campus will be revised to reflect the reduced housing and meal costs. Living at home will not impact any UVM merit-scholarships for which you are currently eligible. Student Financial Services will make every effort to minimize the impact of this option on grant awards, reducing grants only if required under federal regulations. Each student's award will be reviewed and revised individually. In the great majority of cases, the choice to live at home rather than on campus will reduce what students and families would otherwise need to borrow or pay directly.

At-home students may take a 3-credit course tuition-free in Summer 2021 (meeting the eligibility criteria as detailed in the At-Home Option for Fall 2020 Election Form).

Yes. SAS will continue to support students remotely and work with them to ensure that their accommodations are implemented while they are learning from home.

Students learning from home will be able to access a range of services such as tutoring, writing support, digital library resources and reference librarian consultations, Helpline computer support, and advising appointments.

All students have access to library help lines (chat, email, and phone calls with reference librarians), research consultations (in-depth consultations with librarians), all electronic materials (electronic databases, ejournals, and ebooks), scanning services (e.g., scanned chapters from print books and scanned articles from journals), and even in some cases mailed copies of print books. A summary of services for students who are not on campus in Fall 2020 can be found on the UVM Libraries website.

UVM faculty have been working hard for the past few months to learn new technologies, teaching techniques, and course design methods in order to offer students excellent online and remote instruction in Fall 2020. At-home option students may end up taking online courses where all the work is completed online and there are few if any live meetings except office hours or group work, remote streaming courses where the instructor teaches a live class interacting with students who are all in different locations, or designated mixed instruction courses where some students are in the classroom, and others join remotely (not all mixed instruction courses will be open to at-home students).

No, all course material (learning goals, assignments, and exams) will be the same for on-campus and at-home students. However, some courses may use exam proctoring software for remote students, but in-person proctoring for on-campus students.

This will vary from course to course. For classes with exams, faculty may choose to use exam proctoring software. Information about the software should be included in the course syllabus.

Yes. Students choosing the at-home option will be able to register for one 3-credit Summer 2021 course tuition-free as long as they meet the following eligibility conditions:

• must be an undergraduate student enrolled exclusively online/remote for the Fall 2020 term
• must remain enrolled full-time for the Fall 2020 term
• must have paid the fall semester in full
• credits cannot be transferred to another person or used for any term other than Summer 2021
• students whose academic year tuition is already covered by other sources such as an athletic grant, tuition remission, etc. are not eligible for this tuition-free 3-credit course

A student who earns the tuition free Summer 2021 course can use that free course toward an undergraduate, graduate, or CE level course. The student must be an undergraduate in Fall 2020 to earn the course but could use it after graduation in Summer 2021.

The course is only for Summer 2021 and cannot be transferred to a future term. The tuition benefit is for one 3-credit course or it can apply to a combination of courses that equal 3 total credits. In addition, this benefit cannot be transferred to anyone else.

At this time, the at-home option is only available for Fall 2020.