Student cancellations, late dropouts and course cancellation
How do doctoral students cancel their participation in a course? How are late droputs handled? What do I need to do when I have decided to cancel a course? These questions and a few more are answered on this page.
Student cancellation of course place
Doctoral students can cancel their participation via the Ladok student interface, but are encouraged to also inform the course organiser. Exception applies to courses that start in early January - for these, any cancellation has to be made directly to the course organiser in order to meet the 30 days’ time limit.
Please note that no notification will be sent to the course organiser when cancellation is made via Ladok. Thus, take as a routine to check Ladok regularly after transfer of admitted to Ladok has been done and until course start.
See instruction on how to see in Ladok that cancellation has been made (in Swedish) and when this has been done.
See also below regarding handling of late dropouts.
Handling late dropouts
A late dropout is when a student has accepted an offered course place and then, later on, cancels his/her participation less than 30 days before course start, or during the course. Absence or non-completion of the course is also considered to be a dropout.
The department that provides the course is entitled to charge the supervisor (of a KI doctoral student or postdoc) an administrative fee since it affects the course provider’s planning for the course as well as possibilities of full financing. Illness, sick children etc. are acceptable reasons for absence, though.
The department determines the size of the fee, but the recommended guideline by the Course and Programme Committee is up to SEK 3,000 if an applicant drops out 30 days or less before the course start or during the course (this applies to both theoretical and laboratory courses).
The students are informed about the cancellation terms in connection with the admission offer. In order to accept the course place, the applicant must certify that he/she has read and accepts the cancellation terms and that the supervisor (alternatively PI/head if the applicant holds a PhD) has been informed about the course applied for as well as the cancellation terms. In other words, a supervisor's signature or similar is not required, instead it is the applicant who certifies that the supervisor is informed.
Compensation to the course provider in the event of late dropout with or without valid reason
For some courses the administrative fee for dropouts does not cover the economic loss of the granted funding for completed course. In order for the course provider not to be negativley affected by late dropouts, whether they are dropouts with or without valid reasons, the following applies[1]:
- When having a droputs with valid reason (illness, care of sick child etc), full compensation is given for the student in question (i.e. the student is counted as if he/she has completed the course)
- When having a droputs without valid reason the course provider has the possibility to charge the administrative fee. On top of that, the current doctoral programme (or the Course and Programme Committee, in the case the funding comes from the committee) pays any difference between the fee and the amount that would have been granted if the student had completed the course.
For this reason, it is important that droput and the reason for this is noted in the participant list when requesting granted funding (from the committee or the appropriate doctoral programme), as well as information about administrative fee that has been charged.
[1] The Course and Programme Committee, 2016-05-31 and 2018-10-02.
To cancel a course
When a decision has been taken (in dialogue with the doctoral programme/s) to cancel a course, please do the following:
- Notify the students, as well as any reserves, asap.
- Notify the Ladok administrator at the course responsible department to have the admitted applicants removed from the course occasion in Ladok.
- Notify the central administrative officer via doctoralcourses@ki.se (who will notify ladok@ki.se to have the course occasion cancelled, and evaluation@ki.se to remove the course from their list of planned course evauation).