The Council on Academic Affairs approved a new introductory political science course during its meeting Thursday.

Richard Wandling, a political science professor, said the course would make the political science major more comprehensive.

He said currently there are only public policy courses for upper-level students.

“The course comes out of concern that there’s a major gap in our curriculum, and we have some public policy classes in the upper division level, but we don’t have a general intro to public policy class,” Wandling said.

The council also approved a revision to the political science program that would change the introductory core requirements from 19 to 22 hours to include the new course.

To adjust to the additional hours required, the revision also removes three hours in elective courses to keep the total at 46 hours for the major.

“One of our selling points as a majors is students can do minors with it and maybe even a double major,” Wandling said.

He said the requirement changes would not affect students already enrolled in the program or transferring from another college, but they could elect to be a part of the revised program.

The council also approved time revisions for a biology course, “BIO 4956: Mammalogy.”

The revisions increase the lab hours for the course from two to three.

Jill Deppe, a biology professor, said the increase in hours would allow students to have enough time to travel to various fields to examine animals.

“It’s not necessarily much more new material, but we want to give the students a chance to have enough time to thoroughly look at examples in the lab, to do exercises and to prepare and archive them in our collection,” she said. “Two hours is just not enough time.”

Deppe said the additional hour would align the mammalogy course with other courses in the department about birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.

The council also approved revisions to two psychology courses.

“PSY 4265: Methods in Behavior Management,” was revised to be available through technology-delivery during the Summer 2013 semester, and it was changed from a 3000 to a 4000-level course.

Keith Wilson, a psychology professor and the instructor of the course, said the course includes projects like observing people in public settings and relating personal experiences to topics in the class.

 “PSY 4585: Special Topics in Psychology” was also revised to be available through technology delivery during the Summer 2013 semester.

The course was also revised to require a grade of a C or better in the introductory psychology course for admittance.

Stephanie Markham can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].