On rare occasions there are reasons that may make it appropriate to convert omnibus credits for doctoral students. The only changes of this type that the PSU will allow is the conversion of 601 Research credits to 603 Dissertation credits or vice versa. Only 603 Dissertation credits can be used to meet the university requirement of 27 credits of dissertation (18 credits for Ed.D. students). Credits such as 602 Independent Study, 605 Reading and Conference, 607 Seminar, or any other omnibus or discrete-numbered courses cannot be converted to either 601 Research or 603 Dissertation credits.
Please note that these changes are not routine for Registration and Records to make. They are time consuming and can be problematic. Moreover, they are usually preventable; if students are properly advised, they will be registering for research and dissertation credits at the appropriate points in their degree program, and such conversions would be unnecessary.
The following limitations were implemented Fall 2005:
- No credits will be converted unless the change is necessary for graduation. The Graduate School will often hold conversion requests until the time of graduation in order to determine whether the change is actually necessary for graduation.
- No 601 Research or 603 Dissertation credits will be converted that are more than two years old at the time the conversion request is made.
- A maximum of 27 credits of 601 Research can be converted to 603 Dissertation.
- Credits cannot be split during the conversion process. For example, if a student has 4-credit section of 601 Research and wants to convert these credits to 603 Dissertation, but only needs 2 credits of 603 Dissertation in order to graduate, the 4-credit section will not be split into a 2-credit section of 603 and a 2-credit section of 601. In this instance we would allow all 4 credits of 601 to be converted to 603.