Policy Committee
Minutes
February 11, 2005

Present: Jim Hicks, Linda Bastian, Jane Holman, Frost Johnson, Mike Warwick, Samantha Lelo, Michael Sonnleitner, Taylor Hanna, Porter Raper

Guest: Karen Jolly, EAC Chair

Reports from the forums: all forums have been completed, and we heard from committee members who facilitated.

All reported general positive support for the idea of prereqs if the policy is implemented under the right conditions. It was also clear that the support would disappear if particular areas were not addressed as part of the policy.

Here are the primary areas that would need close attention:

• DE needs increased resources to handle the larger number of students diverted to its courses.
• Advising, financial aid, student records depts. would need significant support/resources (they’re already overburdened).
• The administration would need to allow lower enrolled courses to continue during the  transition period when students needing basic skills were redirected to DE.
• There was wide concern for non-degree/casual students.
• The choice for SACs to be able to opt-out of prereqs for particular courses seemed instrumental to garner support for a college-wide policy.

The committee believed, given the feedback in the forums and email, that we should move forward with crafting a policy recommendation for college-wide prereqs, conditional on particular areas of concern addressed.

Discussion:

Jim: can we switch course on support of the policy (if it were sent to the president and it was implemented, and the PC/EAC were unhappy with specific, fundamental pieces that were supposed to be implemented but weren’t)? The answer was a definite yes, although it would happen at the EAC level.

Is there a question about the greater good for our students (if the admin only partially implemented our recommendation)?

Mike wondered if SACs choosing to opt-out would do so based on enrollment, and we talked about whether it would be possible to make the opt-out path based on grounds other than enrollment. Someone brought up the issue of an institutional responsibility to embrace the prereqs so that they would apply to as many courses as possible.

We also decided that as we proceeded with the college-wide involvement in this issue, we ask SACs to discuss the related issues of grade inflation and the possibility that some courses have compromised their focus on college-level material/assignments to help accommodate the lower skill set of their students. We were reminded of students who voiced their concern that professors were spending class time going over basic skill information for some students (this was primarily voiced by three students at a Cascade forum, and reaffirmed by Samantha Lelo, ASPCC president at Cascade). What about surveying faculty regarding their opinions about this?

For the issue regarding nondegree-seeking students and the barrier concern, the committee discussed various scenarios before agreeing that there should be a way that these students could take courses without being tested. The concern was that many of these students might choose not to take courses if they have to take tests to meet prereqs; however, there was also the worry that nondegree-seeking students should be generally treated the same as degree-seeking.  We settled on allowing those students who are auditing courses to be able to take classes without required prereqs, and those who are taking courses for credit to have placement tests and thus have the prereqs met.

There is a related issue regarding the use of audit/P-NP grades brought to us by the Math SAC. We will look at this again at the next meeting, and perhaps include it in the current prereq policy recommendation under consideration.

We also decided that we needed more research as we move forward with crafting a policy recommendation.

• nationally, we want to see if research has been conducted in a before/after study of institutional prereqs.
• vulnerable students: we want to determine how many of these students (those who don’t have college-level skills) are on financial aid and what their population breakdown is: minorities and head-of-household. We want to be able to see—if the prereq policy is adopted—whether we are truly helping these students (perhaps we could go back 5 years to look at their success level. How are we doing now with them? Will there be evidence that our policy change really helps them?)
• Mt Hood: we want to see what they experienced with prereqs (and other colleges as well.)

Taylor brought up the need to have a more systemic discussion with faculty/SACs/advising about study skills. The feeling is that many of our students need basic study skills, and we can use this policy exploration to help address this important issue.

We decided to meet again on Friday, Feb 25^th at 2:30 (Central again) to craft a policy recommendation. We also decided to place the forum notes on the PC website.