The Academic Planning Council held a meeting on Oct. 27 to follow up on topics that happened in the last meeting, along with two new proposals.

In response to the discussion during the last meeting about removing the UW-Platteville german major, an APC member commented that it is “useful remembering how difficult these decisions can be, how they can impact the livelihood and wellbeing of our colleagues and reinforce how seriously we need to consider the role of program evaluations.”

The APC mentioned that there will be an evaluation of the German major and they will make recommendations if they need to.

Next, they talked about the APC’s role in evaluations of majors and programs, and a way of keeping a record was proposed. The process would be a two-step ranking system in which majors would be ranked by enrollment. 

The proposed system was ranking the number of degrees and majors within each department based on how many students were enrolled. Then the majors would be ranked amongst each other and placed in one of three groups: the top group with the highest enrollment and the lowest group with the lowest enrollment.

From there, the departments in the lower groups would have to provide a response in which the department must have a plan on how to get their enrollments up for a certain major.

Multiple points were mentioned, such as the decreased enrollment at UW-Platteville and how that might affect the major enrollment numbers, defining the difference between program and major and being able to re-evaluate this process every couple of years.

The APC members decided this proposal was a work in progress and it was too early to put in motion.

The last topic of the night was to introduce a possible new major that combined computer science and electrical engineering. Computer engineering would introduce four new courses to meet the major requirement to fulfill students’ interests in both areas, but consideration will be continued in the next meeting.