Undergraduate Studies Committee

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

12:45 p.m.  On-line via Zoom Platform

Meeting Minutes

Attending Voting Members: F. Weening (AMAT),  Y. Lin (BIOL), E. Corradi (CAEE), S. Hong (CHBE), C. Hood (CS), E. Oruklu (ECE), A. Sandhu (FDSN), E. Hazard (HUM), C. Wark (MMAE),  J. Miller (PSYC), R. Klaszky (ROTC), J. Twombly (SSB),  P. Ireland (SSCI), R. Trygstad (ITM), R. Tyagi (SGA).

Also attending: J. Gorzkowski (UGAA), G. Smith (UGAA), M. Bauer (CS), F. Estrada (Admissions), C. Himes (CSL), M. Lopez (Academic Affairs), A. Matari-Renno (Registrar's Office), N. Novak (Galvin), T. Riley (Admissions), A. Patelidas (Registrar), G. Pulliam (CAC), M. Haynes (UGAA).

Departments with absent voting members: ARCH, BME, CHEM, PHYS.

Documents for this meeting are available at: <https://www5.iit.edu/~ugsc/documents/2020-2021/>

Meeting chaired by Kathryn Spink.

Minutes recorded by Greg Pulliam

Quorum declared at: 12:50 pm

Adjourn at: 1:48 pm

1. Approval of the minutes for August 25, 2020. 

         The minutes for August 25, 2020 were approved by unanimous consent.

2.  Information item: Revisions to the BS in Psychological Science (Miller). After the revisions were explained, there was no discussion nor any objections.

3.  Continued discussion of the report from the Illinois Articulation Initiative (IAI) Working Group which met over the summer.  The report includes two proposals for this committee—a policy on how the IAI's General Education/Core Curriculum (GECC) Module will be applied to IIT's Core Curriculum, and a change to IIT's Core Curriculum which will allow the policy to be implemented.

     As was the case in the previous UGSC meeting, discussion centered around the university's mission-specific "carve-outs" in the proposed policy—focusing mostly on those for the Humanities/Fine Arts and Social/Behavioral Sciences and the conflation of two IAI transfer courses (6 hours) into a single IIT (3 hours) equivalent. Admissions expressed concern that these carve-outs and the conflation will make IIT less attractive to community college transfer students than we would otherwise be, as these students would "lose" 9 hours of their community college course work. Faculty tended to express support for the carve-outs.

4.  Student Course Evaluations and Teaching Quality discussion. Matt Bauer (CS) and Carol Emmons are working on a redesign of the course and teaching evaluation process at the request of the Faculty Council, and brought it to the UGSC for discussion and input, as they will also do with the Graduate Studies Committee.

5.  Brief refresher from Gozkowski on UGAA policy of the awarding of IIT (H) credit-hours to native speakers of languages other than English for foreign language placement exams.

Adjourn.