The Council on Academic Affairs will be discussing changes to the English departmental honors admissions standards and the interdisciplinary film minor today.

The major change in the English Honor admissions, which if passed would take effect Fall 2012, is that students would have to take two additional English classes beyond the required ENG 1001 and 1002 prior to applying for English Honors.

Within the interdisciplinary film studies minor, one of the major changes is possibly allowing students to count two of the classes for both their minor as well as their major of choice.

This is in contrast to the current policy, which states, “Students may take no more than six hours in their major area(s) and no more than six hours of elective courses in their major area(s),” according to the revision proposal.

Starting next week, the CAA will implement learning goals subcommittee breakouts, which will begin at 2 p.m. and are followed by a regular meeting at 3 p.m.

“We talked about it a lot last semester,” said Rebecca Throneburg, chair of the University Learning Goals Committee. “We will begin these meetings this semester breaking into the subcommittees of the four learning goals.”

The four goals are for undergraduates to be able to speak and write effectively, think critically and function as responsible global citizens.

Each of the four subcommittees will be responsible for one of the learning goals.

“Basically we will be looking at and studying data concerning each of these goals,” Throneburg said. “We will bring up concerns and figure out if we are being systematic enough about each of them.”

Throneburg said some of the data she is talking about are course outcomes, but the subcommittees will probably also do faculty surveys.

From there, the subcommittee members will make their recommendations to the CAA and then to other governing offices on campus.

“We are the curriculum body so we may make some changes such as doing more writing-based work on the strengths and weaknesses we find,” Throneburg said. “We are going to look at our requirements such as general education courses and say ‘are we happy with these?'”

The CAA meets today at 2 p.m. in Room 4440 in the Booth Library.

Amy Wywialowski can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].