CHARGES TO THE ACADEMIC PROCEDURES AND POLICIES COMMITTEE FOR FY-07

Approved by SenEx: 6/8/06

Modified 7/27/06 and 8/22/06

Standing Charges

1. Confer with the Senior Vice Provost, the University Registrar, and other administrative officials as needed on appropriate academic matters, including, but not limited to any changes in class scheduling, course duplication, enrollment procedures, and undergraduate certificate programs.

2. Monitor academic policy issues raised by COCOA (Board of regents Council of Chief Academic Officers) and the Council of Presidents of Regents institutions.

3. Monitor proposals for Program Restructuring and Discontinuance, hold hearings, and follow other procedures in accordance with USRR Article VII.

4. Submit to SenEx: a) the approved minutes of each meeting; b) recommendations for action as they are approved by the Committee; c)a final report by April 1, 2007. The final report should make clear what was done (or not done) about each of the charges to the Committee, and should make recommendations to SenEx for any further action. The report should also provide the names of the committee members, including suggestions for changes in membership, and for the chair of the next year’s committee.

Additional Charges

5. The current student course enrollment process is inadequate. The current process lacks the ability to determine if a student has completed the required pre-requisites for a course within which the student is attempting to enroll. This issue is critical and affects both student outcomes and faculty members' ability to properly instruct classes.

a. Begin examination of the University-wide pre-requisite identification procedures currently used in the Registrar's office, to include experience and procedures recently implemented in Mathematics.

b. Work with the ACTC Committee to determine the feasibility of computer program software installation that can, for all units on campus, identify during course enrollment whether a student attempting to enroll in a given course has completed a given course's pre-requisite requirements.

c. Develop policy recommendations for pre-requisite review at the time of enrollment and develop policy recommendations for issues of disenrollment prior to the start of each term.

6. Determine whether or not a University committee should be established to examine the issue of grade inflation. Please see comments from FY '06 AP&P that follow, below.

"AP&P coordinated with Deb Teeter and Ryan Cherland of OIRP to gather information about grades students have received at the University over the past 10 years. As a result of this request, OIRP generated a "Grade Analysis Over Time" report (this report has additionally been provided to all Deans). This report examined by statistical analysis the GPA recorded every four years between 1984 and 2004 for all major units (the College of liberal Arts and Sciences and each of the professional schools).A special meeting was held on April 6, 2006 to discuss the report. Our Committee remains concerned about the overall teaching issues that could potentially impact student outcomes and faculty performance, without specifically addressing an outcome to report to Governance. As a result of this meeting, AP&P makes the following recommendation to Governance:

The issue of grade inflation is not a policy or procedure issue with respect to the type of charge that should be given to AP&P, but is instead a topic that relates to the behavior of faculty, i.e, whether or not there is grade inflation is an institutional cultural issue. Consequently, AP&P recommends that if the University wishes to pursue the topic of grade inflation at the University, then an organized body, other than AP&P, should be assigned to investigate.

If the University wishes to investigate grade inflation and have the analysis properly and carefully statistically performed (ask the correct questions to allow a meaningful analysis), then, the FY '06 AP&P committee respectfully suggests that the University begin immediately to obtain course-by-course information, prospectively. Although PeopleSoft does not currently have this information (according to OIRP), each unit could easily generate GPA data for each instructor, could easily identify the category of each instructor (i.e., permanent faculty versus graduate student, etc.) and each course (name, level, team-taught versus individual, each semester, etc.). A similar retrospective analysis would perhaps also be informative; however, because of the conversion to PeopleSoft in 2003, neither the name of the instructor nor the level of the instructor (i.e., permanent faculty, instructor, graduate student) are associated with course information from 2003-present."

Therefore, these data may not be as informative. For some units, e.g., Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences, Mathematics, etc., past records could easily be updated in regard to name of instructor, etc., because of a presumed relatively higher consistency in regard to the faculty member who teaches a given course. But, for many other units, updating these past records over a 20-year period may be more difficult."

7. Review the requirement in the course repeat policy that the Registrar contact the instructor to ascertain whether the student’s grade was the result of academic misconduct.

8. Examine USRR 2.6.5, Sanction 6 (Disciplinary Probation), consider proposal from the College Academic Council , and report recommendation to SenEx by 2/1/07.

(Attachment: Memo dated 4/13/06 to Senate from College Academic Council)