Commencement

Like all of the University of Washington campuses, UWT has one commencement ceremony per year, held at the end of the Spring Quarter. Currently, commencement is on the last Friday of finals week and the ceremony takes place in the Tacoma Dome. The program runs about two hours. All students who graduated in the previous Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring are eligible to participate, as well as those students who are going to finish their degrees by August of the coming summer. If you expect to be a summer graduate, you have a choice which ceremony you would like to participate in, but you can only "walk" once.

Information about the ceremony and what you need to do to prepare for it can be found on the UWT Commencement page. Only students who have applied to graduate and have handed in their portfolio by the second week of the Spring Quarter are eligible to participate in commencement.

Notes About Commencement and Graduation

There is some confusion about the differences between these two similar concepts:

Commencement

Commencement is a formal ceremony, a social event that takes months of planning and preparation. We work with the best available information we have to construct an accurate and meaningful event; however, it is not the official moment of degree granting. You do not receive your actual diploma during the ceremony.

Graduation

Graduation is that moment which occurs when an individual audit of your particular record is finished and you are entered in the computer as having graduated in the month you finished the requirements. Once your degree has been granted, a few days to a few weeks after grades are submitted, your name is included in a batch to be printed on a diploma, and it takes 6 weeks to a few months for you to receive it in the mail.

At commencement, only the students who graduated in the past Summer, Autumn, and Winter Quarters can be sure they have officially been granted a degree. Most of these students already have a diploma. However, for the spring and summer graduates, it is unknown at the ceremony if they will graduate on time. The Spring Quarter grades have not even been collected at the time of the ceremony, so it is impossible to have an accurate list of graduates. If you fail a requirement in the Spring or Summer Quarter, even though you walk in the ceremony, you will not graduate and you will not receive a diploma.

Commencement Honors designations (the wearing of cords at the ceremony and notations in the program) are based on GPAs earned only through the end of Winter Quarter. This is our "best guess" about which students will eventually receive honors and, for those students who graduate in Spring or Summer, this guess may be inaccurate once all the subsequent grades are computed. Students whose GPAs are under the honors threshold as of Winter Quarter, are ineligible for the unofficial designations at the ceremony. However, if your final GPA meets honors demarcations, it will be officially noted on your diploma and transcript. So, if it is important to you to have your name marked for honors on the program, be sure to have the correct GPA by the Winter Quarter before you graduate. Conversely, the GPAs of students whose names are marked in the program as earning honors could slip and the honors designation would not appear on their diploma or transcript. Check with your adviser for more details.

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