Prerequisite Implementation Committee Summary – October 20, 2006
Overview: Because of the unknown number of students affected by the prereqs policy, we left our last meeting in June with a recommendation to phase in the prereqs, starting in the fall of 2007 with Wr 90, Wr 90, and Math 10. At the time, this made a lot of sense, but the ground has shifted.
With the hiring in July of our new Enrollment Manager, Veronica Garcia, we were fortunate to get someone who knew Banner and its limitations. When she discovered the timeline spelled out in the prereq policy, she was convinced that sticking to the schedule would be detrimental to students. She also was worried about the sequence of tasks needing to be completed before prereqs could be implemented: some of these tasks needed tackling years ago, but because of budget cuts, the college has neglected these areas (see below for examples). Because of the above, our infrastructure won’t be able to enforce prereqs for targeted courses until fall 2008.
Chris Chairsell gave a briefing of the infrastructure challenges and plans to improve the services necessary for prereqs to be implemented:
- Degree audits: PCC has 32,000 transcripts to be evaluated. We are 1.5 years behind w/ transcripts. A college our size should have 5 transcript evaluators, but we have had only one (a 2nd is starting soon). We need to be able to evaluate transcripts before prereqs can be implemented, and the plan is to hire 4 casual FT evaluators.
- Electronic transcript evaluation: once we catch up w/ the backlog, then we’ll need to move toward electronic evaluation. Unfortunately, the current system we have won’t work, and PCC will need to purchase another one (such as DARS, a commonly used higher ed degree auditing program). Once this occurs, advisors won’t have the burden of manual overrides.
- Before prereqs can be implemented, the catalogue (which has many errors) needs to be cleaned up—otherwise, problems for Banner and students will be compounded.
Chris has shared her outline of the plan to confront these challenges to Cabinet (along with a timeline), and they are very supportive—they’re also very supportive of prereq implementation.
SAC in-service: a discussion about the points needing to be made on 10/24 for faculty to consider prereqs and opting out. Porter will talk in the general session to faculty.
Gen Ed and opt-out: the committee chairs have met with. Kendra Cawley, chair of the Curriculum Committee, to develop criteria for those SACs petitioning to opt-out particular courses out of the policy. Possible questions to ask petitioning SACs:
- What is the rationale for this course being excluded from the prereq policy?
- How does opting out benefit the students in this course?
History 100 course: we will set up a meeting between History, DE, and ESOL to discuss how to best serve the students in that course.
Questions:
- Is there curriculum development money for DE to play a consultative role for 100 level courses?
- Would it be preferable to have a WR & RD 90 prereq on the History 100 course?
The meeting ended before we could get to the work which has occurred or is still going on in the other subcommittee areas (communications, research, and student services), but this will be a priority for the next meeting.
Next Prereq Meeting: November 17th, 9-11, room 305, Central