9/30/09 

The ECC held its second meeting of the year on September 30.  The discussion at the past two meetings has been dominated by discussion surrounding the new graduation requirements, which have been approved by the faculty and are set for implementation for the incoming Class of 2014.  However, there are a number of details which have not yet been resolved and so which fall to the ECC to discuss and legislate in the coming year. 

For Senate’s reference: the new graduation requirements include (among other things):

• Revamped distros (now called Pie Slices) requiring courses in six areas: Humanistic Inquiry, Social Inquiry, Literary/Artistic Analysis, Arts Practice, Formal or Statistical Reasoning, and Science. 
• 3 courses required designated “QRE” (Quantitative Reasoning Encounters) which have a significant component focusing on data analysis
• A “Global Understanding” requirement replacing RAD to include one course in international studies, one course in domestic intercultural studies, and the language requirement
• PE will now count up to 4 terms of club sports for the requirement
• Expanded writing requirement to include:
  • Required freshman seminar (Argument and Inquiry Seminars) that will basically look like the current freshman seminars (they will span all departments, at least in theory) but be required and have a significant writing component
  • A “Writing Requirement 2” course (what this might be is as yet unspecified, but possibly this would happen within the major during the junior or senior year)
  • Writing Portfolio is itself more or less unchanged but the requirements for the portfolio may change if the decision is made to use it as an assessment metric for different curricular outcomes (see “Assessment” discussion below)

Majors and Comps work are largely unchanged. 

Outstanding issues in implementation that are on the ECC’s agenda for this year include:

• The nature of WR2
• How to deal with students who fail the Argument and Inquiry seminar
• What will be required of courses in order to receive International, Intercultural, or QRE designation
• Possible changes to the structure of the Writing Portfolio
• How to deal with transfer students in the next 2 years (new or old requirements?)

At the September 30 meeting, the only one of these issues actually discussed was that of transfer students.  The faculty (led by Dave Musicant) seem to be of the opinion that transfer students should fall under the requirements of their graduating class (i.e. incoming juniors should follow the requirements of all other juniors) to make advising less complicated and create a more cohesive peer community within majors of specific years.  The administration (led by Liz Ciner) are more inclined to say that all new students, transfers included, should fall under the new graduation requirements because these new requirements may be what made the student decide to transfer in the first place.  The issue was unresolved at meeting’s end. 

The bulk of our discussion on September 30 was about assessment for the new grad. requirements.  Although Carleton’s accreditation was renewed last year, due to the current transition state we were unable to prove to the accreditation committee’s satisfaction that we are meeting all of our pedagogical goals.  A team will return in 3 years to review how well the new requirements are working out, and so to prepare for that we need both institutional and departmental-level assessment metrics in place. 

Nathan Grawe, leading the institutional-level assessment team, last year succeeded in getting the faculty to approve a Mission Statement from the college.  From this mission statement he distilled 6 educational outcomes upon which students need to be measured—Breadth of Knowledge, Depth of Knowledge in a Field of Study, Ability to Analyze Evidence, Ability to Formulate and Solve Problems, Ability to Communicate and Argue Effectively, and Independent Intensive Creative or Research-based Work.  Nathan sought ECC’s approval to begin constructing assessment metrics based around these outcomes.  Although ECC approved them in the end, they were amended significantly following a lively discussion.  In particular, the ECC felt Grawe’s mapping of outcomes to areas of the new grad requirements was too limited.   

This issue was mostly resolved, but will probably be ongoing as Grawe’s team (as well as Mary Savina’s departmental-level assessment team) continue work throughout the term.