Undergraduate Studies Committee

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

12:45 p.m.  WH 117

Meeting Minutes

Attending Voting Members: F. Weening (AMAT), K. Spink (BIOL), P. Troyk (BME), E. Corradi (CAEE), S.H. Hong (CHBE), R. Guan (CHEM), C. Hood (CS), E. Oruklu (ECE), D. Gidalevitz (PHYS), J. Miller (PSYC), M. Gray for C. Adams (ROTC), J. Twombly (SSB), K. Berthold (SGA)

Also attending: J. Gorzkowski (UGAA), B. Katz (Digital Learning), M. Lopez (Academic Affairs), N. Novak (GL), A. Patelidas (Registrar's Office), G. Smith (UGAA), C. Torres (CoA), C. Emmons (Assessment)

Departments with absent voting members: ARCH, HUM, MMAE, SAT, SSCI

Documents for this meeting are available at: <http://www.iit.edu/~ugsc/documents/2018-2019/>

Meeting chaired by Greg Pulliam

Minutes recorded by Fred Weening

Quorum declared at: 12:50 pm

Adjourn at: 1:35 pm

1. Approval of the minutes for April 23, 2019.

         The approval of the minutes passed unanimously (11-0).

New Business

2. Election of vice-chair to replace Nick Menhart.

Katie Spink volunteered to be the new vice-chair of this committee. The committee voted (10-0) to approve her election to this position.

3. Information item: new minor in Manufacturing Engineering (Wark)

Since C. Wark was not present at the meeting, this item was deferred until the next meeting.

4. Changes/Issues in Undergraduate Academic Affairs (Gorzkoski, Smith)

· Due to a loss of personnel, the practice of performing an automatic academic audit of a student's records once they reach 60 credit hours will be discontinued. Academic audits will still be performed upon student request.

· The admissions office, instead of UGAA, will now perform evaluation of transfer credit for new incoming students.

Discussion ensued: several members of the committee expressed concern that there is a conflict of interest in having the Admissions Office in charge of giving transfer credit. Other concerns included that turn over of personnel in the Admissions Office might lead to a lack of consistency.

▪ The application process for co-terminal degrees has changed due to the fact that students are now able to propose their own pairing of undergraduate and masters level degree programs. Now, once a student proposes a co-terminal degree program, UGAA will reach out to both the undergraduate and master's degree program to determine if this is a viable pairing. The determination should not be dependent on the particular student who made the proposal. If approved, the pairing will be available in the future as a co-terminal degree program for other students.

Discussion ensued: There was a concern that this may create considerable work for UGAA as students can propose multiple co-terminal degree programs even in their freshman year. There was also a concern that the number of co-terminal degree programs might increase significantly and that this would require considerable resources from departments to maintain course offerings. The was also a question of how this would affect the number of accelerated master's programs available.

▪ Currently transfer students must take at least 45 credit hours from IIT in order to be awarded an IIT undergraduate degree. There is, however, no restriction on these 45 credit hours (e.g. they can all be in non-major courses). Although UGAA did not know of any abuses of this policy, they wanted to bring this policy to the committee's attention.

After some discussion, it was decided to ask for UGSC members to ask for departmental input to see if a change in policy is warranted.

5.   Advising Best Practices Committee (K. Spink)

The University Faculty Council has decided that a standing committee on academic advising should be formed. This will be a subcommittee of the Student Success Subcommittee of the Faculty Council. UGSC members are asked to inform their departments about this sub-committee, and to solicit recommendations of people to serve on this committee at either the graduate or undergraduate level.

Other Business

Some informational items:

· The Business school and ROTC are currently up for assessment of their communications-designated courses.

· As of this date, no proposals for the I-course pilot program have been approved. The pilot program is for this semester and the spring 2020 semester. Faculty interested in proposing I-courses should contact Jeremy Alexis. Students who are interested in taking certain courses as I-courses, should let the instructors  and departments offering theses courses of their interest.