The Council on Academic Affairs voted in favor of revising two chemistry courses during their meeting Thursday.

The classes are CHM 1410 General Chemistry II and CHM General Chemistry Laboratory II.

The lab class is the companion to a three-hour lecture.

The CAA then entertained a motion to suspend the bylaws so the chemistry proposals could be acted on that day and added them to the agenda.

Mark McGuire, department chair of the physical science department, spoke about the classes at the meeting.

McGuire said there were not many changes taking place in the courses.

In the middle of July, McGuire got a request from people who asked him to look at the chemistry classes.

As part of the chemistry classes, they want a currently approved university course proposal.

“You know, the department’s been making an effort in the last couple years to look at our current course proposals, and not all of ours are up on the electronic course library,” McGuire said. “So the first thing we would do is look for an old course proposal and general chemistry really hasn’t changed much because it’s considered a set of courses where students pick up basic skills they have to have in 2000 level courses.”

The department looked a little for the course proposals but McGuire said he did not think it was worth looking.

“If I had to look, that probably meant we don’t have it,” he said. “So we decided to just write a new one.”

What they then tried to do was use the new proposal format.

“Really we were doing it because we needed a course proposal that was up to date and we wanted it to align with the current learning goals,” McGuire said.

Greg Aydt, from the academic advising department, had a question for McGuire.

“It shows that a prerequisite of C or better in general chemistry 1410 and 1415 both will be required, which I think is great,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that was intended to be a change from what you currently have because it was just a C or better on the 1410 and then just a credit in the lab.”

McGuire said they always had a prerequisite of a C in the general chemistry lecture and not in the lab.

“I think a lot of faculty members felt, ‘why?’” McGuire said. “So while we were changing this we just upped the ante.”

The CAA unanimously approved the course revisions for both classes.

The CAA introduced new members Larry White, a professor from the business department, who is replacing a member currently on sabbatical and JaLisa Smith from student senate.

The next CAA meeting will be 2 p.m. Thursday in Booth Library.

Cassie Buchman can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]