A new major, online course evaluations and student-athlete performance were topics of discussion at the Academic Senate meeting Monday.

Chemistry Majors

The Academic Senate unanimously approved a new major: Chemistry for the Professions. This major will only be offered as a secondary major and is to replace the former Teaching Major in Chemistry. The new major requires nine fewer credits in chemistry than the former major.

Kristy Nielson, associate professor and assistant chair of psychology, said, "This is just a lighter major because chemistry requires such a dense workload that students can't do both (chemistry and education majors) without being here too long."

Nielson said this is the continuation of a movement to drop all primary teaching majors that are not through the College of Education.

"Students aren't learning teaching from chemistry, they're learning it from education courses," Nielson said.

Online Evaluations

Gary Levy, associate vice provost for institutional research and assessment, announced that the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment expects all course evaluations, currently completed manually by students, to be completed online by fall.

Some members of the Academic Senate questioned whether the move to online surveys would affect the accuracy of results because average students would be less likely to fill them out while students with extreme views would be more likely to respond.

Levy said not all students will fill them out, but not all students want to fill them out in class either which can also lead to bad data.

"Bad data is worse than no data," Levy said.

Completing the surveys manually also requires a lot of resources, Levy said.

He also said that he intends to organize and clarify university data by gathering more data.

"I'm here because people need help to make decisions; making decisions requires good data," he said.

The OIRA Web site is continuing to increase its data reach. At the Web site, www.mu.edu/oira, users can find such information as major counts, headcount enrollment and class size count information.

Student-Athletes

Intercollegiate Athletics Department staff members presented their work with student-athletes.

The presentation should help faculty members better understand what challenges student-athletes face, Nielson said.

Steven Cottingham, associate senior vice president and interim athletic director, said the student-athlete graduation rate at Marquette is "extremely high" according to NCAA reviews.

"All of our teams have their APR (Academic Progress Rate) above the number of 925, which is what the NCAA said is the minimum," Cottingham said.

The APR measures student-athlete academic performance based on the criterion of maintaining academic eligibility and student retention, Cottingham said.