Overview Form

College And Department

Proposal For a Change in a Program

Proposal For a Change in a Program

Type of Change:

• Prerequisites
From
To
• Number of Credits
From
To
• Required Courses
From
To
• Removal of Courses from Program
Course prefix and number
• Addition of Courses to Program
Course prefix and number
• Remove entire program from catalog
• Other
Explain The addition of a non-thesis track and the addition of math and foreign language requirements for the thesis track.

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Catalog Description:

Justification For Request

What research has led to this request?

These changes will allow us to offer both an Honors Program track with increased rigor and a track that makes the Honors program accessible to more students, especially transfer students. In addition, we have made the requirements for the ‘Honors with Distinction’ track consistent with those of Phi Beta Kappa, a national honors society that Coastal aspires to join. Most Honors Programs nationally have more than one track available for students to graduate with honors, including 4 of 5 of our aspirant Universities. The CCU Honors program has a 6-year student graduation rate of 76%, but a program completion rate of 38%. Nationally, 4-year Honors Programs have a 6-year completion rate of 53%. We believe that adding additional options for participating and completion in Honors will allow more students to complete Honors as part of their CCU curriculum. In addition, most of our aspirant Universities have tracks that make it possible for transfer students to complete an Honors program in a shorter amount of time. Exit surveys indicate that a common obstacle to Honors Program completion is the difficulty in completing the final required credits for the thesis project, either because of conflict with major requirements (e.g. senior internships) or because of the difficulty in securing a faculty mentor. As we seek to grow the number of students in the Honors Program, requiring every Honors Program student to complete an individual mentored thesis project would mean that the number of honors capstone thesis courses would increase and fall disproportionately on the departments with large honors students to faculty ratios. The changes from the wording 'HTC Honors College' to 'Honors Program' within this section are to reduce confusion in the catalog language between the Honors Program and the HTC Honors College, which now contains majors in addition to the Honors Program.

What impact will this request have on existing academic programs?

This proposal may result in the increase in the number of students who need to take a math course such as statistics or calculus each year, as well as the number of students taking intermediate foreign language. This is, academically, a good thing for more students to complete these courses, but it would require more seats from the affected departments. If half the current number of entering honors students elects the Honors with Distinction track, that would be roughly 100 seats of each needed each year. However, most of our graduating honors students already take math at that level, so the increase in the number of students wanting more math courses each year would likely be around 30, spread over several different courses in different departments. However, not many students currently take foreign language at the intermediate level, so this would result in a net increase in demand across the different languages. It is not possible to know in advance how many of these students would need to have an additional foreign language course as opposed to taking the placement test and completing intermediate foreign language instead of 115.

What financial costs are associated with this request?

This would likely result in the need for an extra section of a popular language such as Spanish each semester. The rest of the changes would be small increases spread across many existing sections in LIS as the various departments that offer calculus and statistics courses.

If NO change in cost is anticipated, how is this possible?

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Any additional information