Student Academic Policies Committee

Present Senators: Burrows, Doyle, Dries, Eimermacher, Lowry, Mize, Mott

Guest: Tom Westendorf (Registrar), Cat Walker (SGA V-P of Academic Affairs)

Issues:

Policy on Fair, Responsible and Acceptable Use of Electronic Resources – All three senate committees have been asked to review the above document and submit constructive criticism to the suggested policy. The following remarks were made.

Page 5: under 6b, 2 Why would it be illegal to obscure the identity of the sender of electronic mail?

Page 5: under 6b,10 There may be legitimate reasons for students to collude on papers or other academic work.

Page 6: under 6d, 4 It would not be unusual to be asked for a recommendation, and the response would be negative.

Page 6: under 6e,1 Doesn’t the university encourage faculty to be involved in some types of entrepreneurship? This would make an email about a prospective consulting job illegal. It is a question of degree of use or abuse.

Page 7: under 6f, 3 Is dissemination of obscene material among consenting adults, or for academic purposes illegal. For example, is showing a film with explicit sexual activity in a classroom wrong?

Who decides if something is obscene? The receiver decides; and if he or she says stop, the sender must stop.

There are a good number of grammatical mistakes.

The Academic Senate is scheduled to discuss this issue at the Oct 13 meeting.

Senators should bring up points at that time.

Gradation in Grading – Information pertaining to + and – grades was collected and shared by the committee members. An email survey from the SBA indicated that 18 faculty were for and 13 were against + and – grades. In the School of Engineering 15 were for, while 4 were against. Informal discussions with faculty in the college were generally in favor of + and – grades. Students felt inclined to favor + and – grades. SGA records indicated that they were in favor of + and – grades some years ago.

A random survey of 20 schools showed most had a + and – system. It was felt that there was a trend to more + and – grades in recent years. Tom Westendorf volunteered to look through a good number of transcripts from recent transfer students to determine the grading schemes at other schools.

The registrar will be bringing the latest version of Colleague on line during the spring of 2001. From the standpoint of implementation, the registrar requested that the + and – grades not be implemented until the fall of 2002. They need time to get other bugs ironed out. He also said that the present grade form and scanner could not be used if + and – grades are introduced.

New Business -- Cat Walker mentioned that SGA was interested in discussing the new Student Assessment of Instruction form.