COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCES

GUIDELINES FOR THE 2010-11 CURRICULUM COMMITTEE

1. There will be no special orders of business.
2. Agendas, proposals and other items of business will be transmitted electronically on Friday of the week prior to the meeting. An e-mail will be sent notifying you of the meeting and telling you the agenda is available on the WEB. Curriculum proposals and other agenda items should be submitted electronically to the committee secretary no later than 4:00 p.m. on the Wednesday of the week prior to the meeting. This is an ABSOLUTE DEADLINE.  An original signature page signed by the sponsor of the proposal and the department chair needs to be submitted to the Dean's Office prior to the day of the meeting. To help expedite the passage of a proposal, a copy should be submitted to the Dean's Office for review and possible corrections or revisions well in advance of that date.
3. The Committee should examine the ability of a department/area to offer a proposed course on a regular basis. In addition, it expects departments/areas to include a "staffing impact" statement with all new course proposals.
4. The Committee will scrutinize proposed courses to determine if there is substantial duplication of content or approach between them and any existing course and, if there appears to be, will urge the departments/areas in question to pool their resources
5. The Committee expects departments/areas to affirm that each proposed course is a sound contribution to the College and to the student's educational experience.
6. The Committee should examine the relationship between specific courses and the programs of the proposing department/area, programs of other departments/areas, and the objectives of the College, as well as anticipated student demand.
7. The Committee will not consider any proposal that has not followed the published format provided by the University Curriculum Committee. Proposals that require a syllabus MUST contain all the mandatory information for course syllabi. This information may be found at the following web address http://www.uww.edu/acadaff/facstaff/curriculum/mandatoryinfo.html. Proposals that do not contain a proper syllabus will be returned.
8. The Committee requires that proposals for comprehensive majors discuss, specifically and in detail, 1) the justification for offering the comprehensive major without a minor with the intent that ‘adequate justification’ should address either of the two previously-established rationales for offering comprehensive majors which are:
   • Address requirements of training for graduate/professional school
   • Provide a multidisciplinary program with a unique combination of courses not found in an existing major/minor
   And 2) how would breadth in the courses of a comprehensive major make up for the loss of in-depth study in another field provided by a minor.
9. Items such as including a new course in majors/submajors, incorporating number changes into programs, deleting deleted courses from programs and correcting wording or typographical errors, will simply be listed (e.g., "Sociology: include new course XXX in all programs") in an "information only" section at the end of the agenda to be "received and recorded" as a group.  If an agenda consists solely of such items, an electronic meeting will be held.  As with all "information" items, any voting member or the chair of the committee may request that any such item be brought to the table for individual consideration.  Substantive program or course changes will continue to be treated as regular agenda items.