part0077

l am a sophomore at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, majoring in mechanical engineering. A story that I heard intrigues me, and might be the newest campus urban legend. Everyone in my dormitory repeated this story, and almost everyone took it as fact .

The claim is that if your roommate commits suicide during the school year, you will receive an automatic 4.0 for the semester from the college administration. This is supposed to make up for the emotional shock and trauma that you have gone through .

But a friend at the University of Dallas told me the same rumor was going around there. He thought that it might have originated in New York where, he said, there actually is such a rule .

Many of my friends here said, “If you don’t believe me, look it up! It’s right there in our student handbook .”

I read the entire book backwards and forwards and could not find it. Then my friends said it was a state law .

While you were reading through your handbook, did you happen to find the rule that specifies how long students are required to wait for a late professor before leaving the classroom? Students keep telling me that this too can be found in their college handbook .

But I think that the rule about roommates of suicide victims, like the rule about late professors, is just a campus legend. (A 4.0 average, for you non-campus readers, is a perfect straight-A record.)

I first heard about “The Suicide Rule” in a variation several years ago when my daughter Dana was a student at the State University of New York at Potsdam. She came down with bad case of mononucleosis and was hospitalized .

She phoned from the hospital to say she was feeling better, adding that one of her dorm roommates had been to see her. The roommate had joked that if, by chance, Dana suffered a relapse and died before the end of the semester, at least all of her roommates could count on getting A’s in all their current courses. There was, she said, a college rule guaranteeing this .

I’d never heard about any such rule anywhere, but when I asked my students at the University of Utah about it, they assured me it was policy at Utah too, but only for suicides .

It turned out that I wasn’t the only professor who grew curious about “The Suicide Rule.” William S. Fox, a sociologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, has collected variations of the legend from students .

He says murders and accidental deaths also qualify the victim’s roommate for the bonus. So does “any slow drawn-out death, for example, cancer .”

The death might have to occur during the last six weeks of the semester, though. And in the case of dormitory suites with several roommates, it’s often said that the grade awarded is only a 3.5, presumably to avoid what college administrators call “grade inflation .”

The bonus is withheld if one roommate murders another —a wise precaution, it would seem .

Professor Fox’s search through college handbooks for these sorts of rules led nowhere, and he has concluded that the legend is false. After all, he points out, “although academic and administrative policies never cease to amaze, it would be quite remarkable indeed if any school granted an automatic 4.0 for any reason .”

Students who have known instances of tragic deaths on campus also have written to me to attest that no such rules exist .

One unfortunate student heard the legend, and then in the next year found it put to the test by two tragic deaths —an instance of a student falling out of a window at Harvard, and a stabbing at the University of Chicago .

“I can positively assert that neither Harvard nor U of C has this kind of policy,” the student, now studying anthropology at Brandeis, wrote to me .

In both instances, the roommates were offered counseling, and allowed to take “incompletes.” But neither was given perfect grades as a reward for enduring such an ordeal .

The suicide-rule legend seems to fit in with other common campus claims about the arbitrary nature of campus grading. There’s the rumor about professors throwing exams down the stairs and grading each paper according to which step it lands on. And the one about professors who distribute exams among their family members, giving the youngest child the job of marking all the A papers .

The recent high incidence of suicides among adolescents —including several taking place on college campuses —makes “The Suicide Rule” story especially disturbing to students. A letter published on October 13, 1988, in SMU’s newspaper, the Daily Campus, reflects this, with the writer, a junior majoring in business, urging students to think twice before they spread “such a ridiculous rumor.” He was aware of the story circulating on several other campuses “for at least the last two years . ”

In February 1989, after a Marquette University sophomore died in a rooming-house fire, the Milwaukee Journal mentioned that the “myth” that an automatic 4.0 grade-point average would be a warded to roommates was “spreading through the downtown campus.” The article, however, then quoted Marquette officials, who emphatically denied that any such rule existed .

If there’s a college campus in the country that does not have “The Suicide Rule” legend, I’ve yet to discover it. And if there’s one that does have such a rule on the books, I haven’t found it yet either .