Back to Index

WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

ACADEMIC COORDINATING COMMISSION MINUTES

Regular Meeting  --  March 28, 2006

Chair Tom Downing called the meeting of the Academic Coordinating Commission to order on March 28, 2006 in OM340 at 4:01 p.m.  There were fourteen (14) members present, three (3) guests, one (1) recorder, and the Registrar for a total of nineteen.(19). (See attached roster). 

Approval of ACC minutes

Commissioners approved the minutes of February 28, with a minor correction to the roster.

Announcements and Reports:

At the request of the Graduate Dean, the Commissioners reviewed the following report:

‘Time to degree’ for Thesis-Required Master’s Degree Programs, a report from an Ad Hoc Committee of the Graduate Council.

Commissioners welcomed Peter Homann, Environmental Sciences, and Merrill Peterson, Biology, who responded to Commissioners questions regarding the extension of time to degree.

·   Chair Downing pointed out that the most recent set of Graduate Council minutes in the ACC’s hands fails to mention the report, so action on our part would be premature.  Downing suggested the next minutes would include such an action, and concluded there is no urgency or even means for ACC accept the report today.  He also expressed the wish that very specific actions should be taken by the Graduate Council for the ACC to approve, not just a general acceptance of the report.

·   Geology and Environmental Sciences are already permitted to operate under the provisions of the Report by action of the ACC on February 1, 2005. This permission expires at the end of the 2006-07 academic year.

·   Downing noted that if we do pass the recommendations in the document later this year then even though they cannot make it into the 2006-07 general catalog, students can choose to operate under these new provisions. The rule of thumb is that we cannot impose new and more stringent rules and conditions than the ones that are in the catalog, but we can permit operation under more relaxed or less stringent rules and conditions that have approved by the ACC but have not yet appeared in the catalog.

·   Provost Bodman added that HEC Board measures the proportion of students who do not complete degrees within the 120 limit credit hours.  Given we have 69 hours, anything below 69 + 20% does not have to be reported.  This measurement could be affected.  Bodman contended that we are constructing an enormously complex situation here.  How do we explain to Financial Aid that we are not sure of completing time to degree, and may not be willing to give internal support? 

·   Homann and Peterson said that the reality is that the majority of graduate students actually take more than two years to finish their theses yet the system is set up to penalize them for doing just that. 

·   Bodman and commissioners pointed out that “Independent Study” should include thesis-related work.

AGENDA ITEMS – Discussion:   

Rotating Finals Schedule

Commissioners examined the rotating exam schedule for classrooms.  The schedule rotates by quarter, that is, there is a different final exam schedule for each of Fall, Winter and Spring Quarters, but from year to year Fall, Winter and Spring Quarter schedules are the same as in the previous year. Some thought was given to varying this, that is, for example, making one year’s Fall schedule the same as the previous year’s Spring schedule, and so on. It was also suggested that we might rotate the times, but it was generally acknowledged that this might be much more complicated. It may be that there is just not compelling reason for any change, since it is hard to argue that there is any unfairness or irrationality in the current system.   The Registrar will check with Troy Ragsdale of classroom scheduling on the possibilities of increasing variation in the rotation.

Course Access for Students in Self-Designed Majors and Minors

Declared majors in a department or conventional program are assigned a code which permits their access to courses in the major which are restricted to majors in that department or program. This turns out to leave out students who have major requirements in a student designed major, say at Fairhaven or in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (and also, perhaps, General Studies majors). These students must go to each department and request an override in order to get into classes required for the individually designed major.  In highly impacted departments they may be “supplicants” for class access for what might be a prohibitive number of quarters.  This strikes almost everyone as unfair and clearly can have a retarding effect on a student’s time to graduation. As unfair as it is, no one could think of a logistically reasonable means for assuring access to these students in any other way. No matter how it is changed, the override would still have to be given at the departmental level by individual request.  Even if a new major category was designed such as “SDM,” the department would have to accept that major status or major code, and it is not obvious that even that could be restricted to just those courses that are part of a student’s major.    Provost Bodman thinks this is a logistical nightmare for the Registrar’s office and for now the override is the best way to enable students to get into the classes they need.

Chair Downing recommends bringing this before the curricular chairs at the meeting in April. 

Withdrawal Policy

Chair Downing recommends the appointment at next meeting of a small Ad Hoc Committee on Withdrawal Policy.  The membership would include the Provost, the Registrar, a student and one or two faculty members. 

APPOINTMENTS

For Spring quarter members welcomed Stan Tag, who was replacing Marie Eaton, and Daniel Boxberger, who was sitting in for Linda Kimball.

READING of Curricular Minutes – Exhibit B:

The following minutes were reviewed for acceptance by the Academic Coordinating Commission: 

** International Programs Minutes of 2/24/06 – Course Approval Process

Teresa Clarke, Registrar’s office, was present to discuss the propose course approval process.

MOTION: A motion was made by Jim Hearne, seconded by Robert Thorndike, to decline the course approval process proposed in the IPAC minutes of 2/24/06, which was passed by the Commissioners.

Several problems have emerged regarding the proposed course approval process include:

·   Under the IPAC proposal, students would come back from study abroad and have a transcript sent from the sponsoring school describing the courses they took; that in turn would go to a receiving department or departments  here (e.g., Political Science or Modern & Classical Languages)  to see if the course(s) would be accepted towards the major or for general credit.  If a course passed muster, the course would then be assigned a WWU class name and number and be “transcripted” in a way that would represent it as our own.

·    The biggest concern is that if we give credit for a course taken abroad by using a departmental rubric, e.g., Political Science x37, we are then “transcripting” someone else’s college course in a way that makes it appear that it was taught by WWU. The Provost averred that this is against the policy of the agency that accredits us. It would be similar to “rebadging” a course taken at, say, UW, with a WWU name and number. This is simply not something we would ever do. We would simply accept the UW course as a transfer course. This proves difficult for courses taken abroad, because it is not always clear how many credits such courses carry or just what the course is about, hence the desire to consider them individually and assign them a WWU name and number after the fact.

Adjournment

Commissioners adjourned at 5:50 pm.

Rose Marie Norton-Nader, Recorder, March 28, 2006

ACADEMIC COORDINATING COMMISSION 2005-2006 ROSTER