Graduate Council Agenda

Thursday, February 25, 2016

2:00 p.m.

Upchurch Conference Room, Bell Engineering

  1. Minutes for the January 21, 2016, Graduate Council meeting will stand approved if no corrections are received. (Please review the Graduate Council Minutes).
  2. Announcements
  3. Report from Committees:
    • Academic Appeals
    • Teaching Assistant Effectiveness Advisory Committee
    • Calendar
    • Library
  4. Old Business: None
  5. New Business, College of Education and Health Professions, Department of Rehabilitation, Human Resources, and Communication Disorders, Proposal to modify the M.S. degree in Counseling (CNSLMS) by deleting the Student Affairs and College Counseling Concentration.
  6. New Business, Graduate School and International Education
    1. Proposal to delete the graduate certificate in Preparing for the Professoriate (PROFGC)
    2. Proposal to offer a graduate certificate in Statistics and Analytics (STANGC)

    Note: All program changes and program proposals may be viewed at https://nextcatalog.uark.edu/programadmin/). Program proposals are also listed in Attachment A.
  7. New Business, Policy Change: We are proposing to change the graduate faculty classification as shown in Attachment B.
  8. Discussion: It has been a policy of the Graduate School that Law students are not eligible to hold graduate assistantships outside the Law School. This is the result of a 1980’s era policy which said that to hold an assistantship, students must be regularly admitted to the Graduate School. Should this policy be changed?
  9. Discussion: Currently, there are many active graduate students who are not enrolled and therefore are not reflected in the 11th day enrollment census reports. We have enrollment requirements only for students who are post-candidacy doctoral students, international students, and students who are on assistantships. We don’t want to have a more extensive continuous enrollment policy because of the cost to the student. It is likely that we would lose many more students with such a policy. However, particularly for the humanities, our graduate enrollment is under-reported.
  10. To solve this problem, we propose that students who are not enrolled in classes and who wish to remain active in UAConnect be required to enroll in a place-holder class with all but $50 of the tuition waived (per semester). This would allow students to retain access to library holdings, their e-mail addresses and other University benefits and they would not have to reapply to the Graduate School and pay an application fee if they wish to resume enrollment. We would discontinue our practice of creating affiliate students. Students who fail to enroll each semester would be assessed a penalty upon readmission.

  11. Course change reports from the University Course and Programs Committee (UCPC) (Attachment C).
  12. Graduate faculty recommendations for faculty: A preliminary list is attached (Attachment D). A complete list will be distributed at the meeting.
  13. Other Business