February

Guaranteed Admission to the UC

For years, the University of California has offered various different forms of guaranteed admission to transfer students. In some cases, the UC has guaranteed admission to specific campuses for community college students that complete a specified set of courses with a certain GPA. Unfortunately, these guarantees have never been available at every campus, and the most popular campuses may not offer any admissions guarantees.

Why Legislative Advocacy Matters

Throughout the half-century since the founding of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC), the ASCCC has become an invaluable source of guidance and leadership in academic and professional matters, but for a range of reasons the ASCCC hesitated in many cases to become involved in statewide advocacy efforts.

Flexibility, Compromise, and Leadership in Decision—Making: AB705 Regulatory Process as a Case Study

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) offers local senate visits and technical assistance visits to colleges as part of the college’s membership with the ASCCC. When colleges request a visit from the ASCCC, we often ask whether the college has a process or procedure documenting what is supposed to happen in the specific situation under discussion. If such a process exists, we work to determine where it is written down and whether the college is following what is written.

Local Senate Succession Planning: Some Considerations

Unless your local senate has procedures in place for selecting a new president automatically (i.e., a president-elect, or a bylaw or constitutional requirement that the vice president becomes the president automatically), succession planning is integral to being a senate president. Yet, succession planning can be one of the more difficult things for a senate president, especially a new senate president, to begin considering.

Busting Equivalency Myths: An Equivalencies Chair’s Perspective

As part of my training to take over the Equivalency Committee on our local campus, the outgoing chair mysteriously cautioned me, “You see, the thing about the Equivalency Committee is that everything is fine—until it isn’t.” At the time, I did not appreciate or even understand her warning, but now, with a few years under my belt, I appreciate the veracity of her observations.

Untangling the Knots —Minimum Qualifications, Faculty Service Areas, Placing Courses within Disciplines and Other Fun Stuff

Minimum qualifications are often at the center of diverse and sometimes contentious topics at local colleges, such as assigning faculty service areas (FSAs), the placement of courses within disciplines, assigning TOP codes, and even the taboo practice of granting single-course equivalencies. Ideally, the understanding and application of minimum qualifications at local colleges should be an independent and consistent process, but the reality is that minimum qualifications are too often conflated with other local issues.

Mythbusting Open Educational Materials

The desire to reduce the costs of course materials for students in our colleges has resulted in various parallel efforts to decrease costs and incentivize cost reductions. Pressures to offer courses with no associated text costs have also resulted in concerns among faculty who can’t envision teaching with materials that are free. The various efforts and concerns have resulted in some measure of confusion. What efforts to reduce costs are underway and what legislation may be creating pressure to consider no-cost resources?

ASCCC Efforts to Support and Advocate for Noncredit Instruction — A Review

Noncredit courses and certificates have been a hot topic of conversation for the last two years, as colleges explore using noncredit for their Adult Education Block Grants (AEBG) and to take advantage of equalized Career Development College Preparation (CDCP) course funding. With nearly 90% of noncredit FTES being generated by less than 10% of our California community colleges in past years, considerations of noncredit implementation and/or expansion is new to a large majority of our colleges.

Local Implementation of AB 705— What We Know and What Remains to Be Answered

Educational systems and stakeholders are continually working to improve the courses, programs, and services provided to students and the community. One recent legislated effort is the passage of AB 705 (Irwin, 2017), which requires changes in assessment, placement, and basic skills instruction at California community colleges. However, how best to put the legislated requirements into local practice is not clear for all California community colleges.

Faculty Primacy and AP Credit

More and more high school students enrolled in the California community colleges (CCC) are requesting course credit based upon passing Advanced Placement (AP) Exam scores. In 2006, 2,266,038 students in the United States took an AP Examination with 405,711 of those exams being taken in California. Ten years later, the total number in the United States rose to 4,559,273 with California accounting for 743,280 of those examinations[1].

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