By Amanda Webster
Concerns over the developing Transfer and Articulation Policy was discussed during the Faculty Senate meeting Monday afternoon.
The policy outline was presented to the Senate by Mark Jackson of the biology department. The framework for the policy was broken down into four sections that transfer students will need to meet in order to transfer in successfully. Tentatively, if students are able to complete the four sections of the policy they will be able to transfer in with a standing junior status.
The policy, which is intended to be completed by October 15 of this year, is supposed to ease the transition of students matriculating into Central from community colleges across the state. The key elements of the policy include a common lower division pre-major package that will encompass 30 transferable credits for general education requirements on top of an additional 30 credits that can be applied towards the student’s major.
The community college will decide what they can offer for general education requirements and the package of classes will be forwarded to CCSU.
“We will end up with possibly 13 combinations of this, the expectations is that most of them will be very similar,” Jackson said about the class packages.
Faculty members said they were skeptical with allowing outside schools to decide what classes would prepare students for their majors. There was also concern over whether certain classes would count one way for one student, but count as a different class for another student based on where that student went to school. Jackson said that the system will be based on competencies, not by departments.
“The idea is that this will make it easier to transfer here because it has more to do with the content of the course, not the particular department that offers the course,” Jackson said.
The first and second sections of the program that students would need to complete are referred to as “designated competencies.” These courses would ultimately make up about 30 transferable credits and count towards the gen-ed requirements. If any of the competency areas are not met from the first two sections then they would need to be embedded into the curriculum.
According to Jackson, these embedded credits can come from Central once the student is transferred in, allowing professors to ensure that students are learning the required material.
Jackson said that through compromise there should be no reason to expect that students transferring in through this system will be behind compared to students who spent all four years at CCSU.
“If you look at this framework with a little bit of compromise what we’re getting is a student with two written courses, two scientific knowledge courses, embedding of critical thinking throughout the curriculum, every area of competency met,” said Jackson. “Students will have every one of those things achieved before they have achieved 60 credits; ask yourself if that looks like a strong student or weak student.”
Cindy White of the Communication department expressed her concern over the process of deciding what classes meet the competency requirements.
According to Jackson, a system still needs to be set up in order to assess the level of quality that students are receiving inside classrooms that are outside of Central.
“There’s no guarantee that you give a faculty member a learning objective that that’s what he’ll talk about,” Jackson said. “It’s a difficult thing to do and there’s no guarantee but compared to what we have now, which is nothing.”