According to Dean of Academic Affairs and Acting JSC President Daniel Regan, Johnson State College is lagging behind the other state colleges in implementing four academic standards that seniors must meet beginning in spring 2009. Those standards have been mandated by Vermont State College’s board of trustees.
“It’s important to realize that all colleges and universities have governing boards,” said Regan. “Our VSC trustees grant us autonomy in nearly all important respects. They impose few mandates on the college; graduation standards are among the very few. Faculty, staff, the president, and I—as well as, we hope, students—see that it is in our interest to enact them in good faith and, in doing so, be able to assert that our graduates have demonstrated reasonable proficiency in these four, key areas.”
Those areas include writing, oral communication, quantitative reasoning and information literacy.
The writing proficiency exam meets the writing requirement; however, the college is working to include students who will be receiving an Associates Degree.
For the time being, students who have met the math requirements will be unaffected. Incoming students will be assessed, and should they not meet the standard, they will take the Quantitative Reasoning course.
The TILT tutorials are lessons online that teach students about where they can find the information they will need for Information Literacy. This will all be Blackboard based. The tutorials will not be pass/fail. If a student does not get it right the first time, he or she will be sent back for more tutorials. First Year Seminars are now mandatory, and information literacy is on the list of components for the courses. They plan to use the TILT tutorials in the freshman year to give them the basic information that they need to succeed.
For oral communications, Lyndon State College has already implemented the plan that JSC will use as well. Students would give a five-minute presentation in a class that already requires a presentation. The professor would mark where he or she believes the student stands in various aspects of communication. The form would be sent to the Registrar and the students would be tracked as to who has completed the requirement. The requirements would be listed in the student course catalogue and on Blackboard.