Curriculum Policy (approved Spring 2016)

  1. All curriculum related items need to be approved by the Curriculum Committee before being forwarded to the department. This includes all workshops in support of or in preparation for courses offered by the mathematics department including those held in the summer or winter sessions.
  2. Items to be approved by the Curriculum Committee must be submitted to the committee chair at least one week prior to a meeting in order to be added to the agenda for that meeting.
  3. Experiment with a new textbook
    • The textbook and the course outline must be approved by the Curriculum Committee and by the department. The only exception to this is for a course that does not have a common final exam, it can instead be by the department chair if the Curriculum committee is not meeting before the start of the following semester.
    • An instructor who proposes adapting a textbook as an experiment should have taught the course at least once and must teach the course him/herself using the book in the semester following the approval of the experiment.
    • If the course has a common final exam, the course coordinator must be consulted on the use of the experimental text and on the proposed outline to ensure that the sections using the experimental text can still reasonably be expected to write the same common final exam.
    • At least one of the instructors who will experiment with the textbook must be full time faculty in the mathematics department.
    • For an experiment with a textbook in a course with a common final exam, those full time faculty who used the textbook as an experiment must provide a brief oral report on the textbook at the Curriculum Committee’s penultimate meeting of the semester.
    • If a textbook has been approved for experiment in a course with a common final exam, and it is not adopted as an official textbook for the course for the following semester, then the instructor needs to get approval if he/she wants to experiment the book again. Any changes in the course outline must be approved by the committee, and a rationale for these changes should be given.  For courses without a common final exam an experiment can be repeated and small changes to the outline can be adopted without further approval as long as the catalog description of the course is heeded, the changes to the outline only either emphasize or de-emphasize topics already covered (i.e. no topics are added or removed), and the course outline is submitted to the chair of the Curriculum Committee before the end of the first week of classes.
    • These policies do not apply to a textbook used when a new course is offered for the first time. In that case the textbook is approved at the same time as the new course description and should be used the first time the course is offered, or else a new official book be adopted. 
  1. Adoption of a new official textbook
    • All textbooks at the Calculus level or below can be adopted only after it is experimented and has received positive feedback from the instructors, or, if the previous textbook is going out of print, with a majority vote of full time members of the department present at a regular department meeting.
    • The official textbook and the course outline must be approved by the Curriculum Committee and by the department.
  1. Course coordinators
    • Course coordinators, in consultation with full time faculty teaching the course and under the supervision of the department chair have final say on the content of final exams. This is a change from past practice when the final exam committee was responsible for the content of final exams. The final exam committee is responsible for producing variations of each problem set by the course coordinator, and for physically producing and organizing the final exam packages.