This sub-committee is meeting by audioconference and will report back to CA and DS from which a motion will be sent to the Faculty Senate. The UAF Faculty Senate moves to approve the Core Review Committee s recommendation on when basic Core skills courses shall be accomplished.
Exceptions are allowable on the basis of permission of instructor.
Having spent a week with Jim Ratcliff discussing the University's mandate for Effectiveness Evaluation, we have identified an obvious flaw in the way the University has enacted the CORE curriculum. For whatever historical reasons the current lack of an imposed time frame for accomplishing CORE skills has come about, if the University is serious about current efforts to do a curriculum-enhancing assessment and to improve the retention of a greater percentage of incoming students, it is time to change the expectation of when basic CORE skills courses shall be accomplished. As the requirements stand, no student is required to complete basic skills courses at any specific point before graduation. This situation is antithetical to any sense of what those courses are intended to accomplish. If, as stated, we intend to give our students the tools with which to be competitive, both in classes at the University and life experience beyond, the most primary skills of writing, speaking, and working with diverse groups must be a part of the educational experience as close to the student's entry into the educational process as we can accommodate.