The Federal Department of Education requires that Federal Title IV Financial Assistance recipients meet academic progress standards each year. Federal Title IV Financial Assistance includes the Federal Pell Grant, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, Federal Perkins Loan, Federal Work-Study, Federal Stafford Loan and Federal PLUS Loan programs. Each university determines its own policy regarding sufficient progress standards.
Federal academic progress standards must include two elements: cumulative QPA and cumulative units. At Carnegie Mellon, we define this as follows: first-year freshman students must pass 80 percent of all cumulative units attempted at Carnegie Mellon and have a 1.75 cumulative QPA after the first year; all other students (excluding graduate students in Tepper and Heinz) must pass 80 percent of all cumulative units attempted at Carnegie Mellon and have a 2.00 cumulative QPA.
Institutional Academic Scholarships are awards that you do not have to repay. The Carnegie Mellon Institutional Academic Scholarships are awarded to students when they enter as freshmen and are renewed annually if the student meets the cumulative 2.0 QPA requirement. These scholarships are renewable for eight semesters of undergraduate education (ten semesters for Architecture students), provided satisfactory academic performance is maintained and the student is assessed Carnegie Mellon tuition.
Carnegie Mellon realizes that extenuating circumstances may contribute to a student's inability to achieve satisfactory academic progress, and thus we encourage students to appeal after receipt of progress failure notification. Appeal examples include; extended illness, changes in major, difficult transition to first-year in college (academically and socially), recent diagnosis of learning disability or a recent death of a close family member.