Student Senate will vote on two resolutions at its Tuesday meeting authored by Alex Ehmke (Dedman II).

The first bill seeks to change the budget process for student organizations from a yearly basis to a semester basis.

Under the new process, student organizations would be budgeted money for the fall semester and then again in the spring semester. Money not used during the fall semester would be returned to Student Senate and redistributed during the spring. The bill would not affect summer Senate funding.

According to Ehmke, the bill is partly a response to what happened last year, when Senate ran low on funds towards the end of the year.

During last week’s Senate meeting, Ehmke and Finance Chair Janet Leung argued that the new process would free up funds that are tied up in bank accounts because many organizations do not use their funds until the spring semester. This means that a lot of money will get returned to SMU at the end of the year when it could have been given to another organization.

Ehmke said the “benefits greatly outweigh the costs” of going through the budgeting process twice.

“When you’re managing $840,000, can it be too much work?” he asked.

Ehmke said the Finance Committee members were behind the bill, and that they did not mind adding another budgeting process to their workload.

He also said he would probably be adding an amendment to his bill that would allow funding under special circumstances as necessary.

The second bill seeks to add A-plus notations to students’ transcripts.

Ehmke is not advocating for A-pluses to change the GPA scale; he only wants to add notations to a students’ transcript.

The inspiration for the bill came from talking to a law school advisor who explained how many law schools give A-pluses preferential status when looking at transcripts. Ehmke said this also occurs on medical school applications.

Ehmke said SMU should add A-plus notations to give students an advantage when applying to graduate schools, although the notation is a small change.