Preliminary results show WSU’s academic affairs program prioritization (A2P2) is right on target for the goal of reducing academic courses by 20 percent.
“Units have done a great job of making some hard decisions,” said Larry James, associate executive vice president, while presenting preliminary results to the Faculty Senate Thursday afternoon.
Zeroing in on the course audit aspect of A2P2, James said colleges had recommended that 821 out of 5,314 courses at WSU — or 15.4 percent — should be dropped.
“We didn’t see any drop we didn’t like,” James said, with a laugh, of the provost office review of the college recommendations.
If all the “contested” drops — those courses the colleges would prefer to keep but the provost would prefer to drop — are added in, the number of dropped courses would total 1,269 — or 25.5 percent.
The A2P2 aim of dropping 20 percent of courses falls right in between the 15.4 and 25.5 percent figures, James said.
Many of the courses recommended to be drop are under-enrolled, he said. That means that the three-year enrollment has been 25 students or less for undergraduate courses and 15 or less for graduate courses.
Under-enrollment was one criterion, but not the only one, for determining which courses to drop.
Degrees audit next
The provost recently returned to the colleges their lists of “drop,” “keep” and “contested” courses. By Nov. 19, the colleges need to verify to the provost the drops and keeps and work with the provost to resolve the contested courses.
James said he expects the dropped courses list to be available for the university community to review in December, with the final list going before the Faculty Senate in January.
An audit of degrees would come next in the A2P2 process, he said.
See the provost office website, ONLINE @ http://provost.wsu.edu/index.html, for more on A2P2.
