Present:  J. Chambers, G. Auleta, M. Loe, B. Goffe, M. LeBlanc, P. Tomascak, J. Huonker, J. Carroll, D. Chepko-Sade, M. Morey

Guests:  R. Mandel, A. Westfall

Minutes of 12/13/05—approved

Item # 1—Discussion of the proposal to enforce through Banner the limiting  of  enrollment in selected classes only to students who meet stated course prerequisites.  A draft of this proposal was developed and presented by John Huonker.

Rhonda Mandel and Andy Wesfall presented information and interpretations regarding this topic in relation to SUNY and Oswego policy, practice, and procedures:

• Until recently, SUNY policy considered all prerequisites as advisory, not binding
• Dave Bozak reports that there may be a shift in this opinion that prerequisites are advisory, but further clarification will have to be sought by the Committee
• Currently, 40% of all new students are transfers, which means that any effort to coordinate/correlate these students’ records into a binding or restrictive enrollment process would require considerable work—especially in light of the numbers of regularly enrolled students who also take course work off campus
• Banner is an all or nothing system—it cannot selectively enforce prerequisites
• The Admissions Office and the Registrar’s Office are piloting a project that will more accurately incorporate transfer students’ off-campus academic records into Oswego’s system—which may ultimately make possible the incorporation of a restrictive pre-registration system.  Students transferring from selected high transfer application schools as OCC, MCC, TC3 and Morrisville are included.

Subsequent discussion explored various aspects of the topic, including: how other schools (Oneonta) are able to do this—(they started earlier), the relative costs for incorporating this capability into our current system (considerable) , the increased staff necessary to take such an action, the steps that go into such an action, the challenge faced by faculty who teach classes with meaningful prerequisites, and the need for departments to reexamine their prerequisites to ensure actual dependencies. 

At the next meeting, the Draft will be re-examined in light of the discussion at this meeting.