With the Banner online registration system set to launch next month, the College Curriculum Council, which approves course caps, is rushing to set class sizes for limited-enrollment courses.
Though Banner's restrictions will not affect courses that are not currently capped, all limited enrollment courses will have a specified numerical limit that cannot be exceeded during pre-registration. In anticipation of this, the College Curriculum Council's screening committee approved Thursday a number of enrollment limits using an abbreviated system for approval. Many of the course caps they approved were for history and political science courses.
"It allows departments to plan for the following year's teaching requirements with their available resources," said Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, who sits on the screening committee, of the course caps. Enrollment limits are typically first requested by professors and then approved by the CCC.
Bergeron said a few departments have requested provisional enrollment limits based in part on available teaching assistant resources. The new Graduate School stipend program, which will guarantee funding for grad students for only five years, could force some TAs to limit their teaching responsibilities. Within some departments, graduate students can take longer than five years to complete their dissertations.
David Beckoff '08, a member of the CCC and the only student at the screening committee's meeting, said the rapid approval process differed from the committee's standard procedure for approving course caps, which usually includes evaluation by students and faculty. But Beckoff added, "There was no kind of crisis in an appearance that students and faculty were being excluded."
"Because of Banner, there were so many of these (undefined course caps) which were not essentially new caps," said Senior Research Engineer William Patterson, a CCC member, of the enrollment limits reviewed during Thursday's meeting.
Course sizes are usually determined by a series of rough rules, such as that seminar classes should not exceed 20 students, Patterson said.
Though these sizes are only advisory, Patterson said the screening committee deals with requests for courses with strict enrollment numbers like the English department's expository writing courses and VA 10: "Studio Foundation."
The committee approved caps for courses using a list compiled by Bergeron and Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar, who is the Banner project owner, that included the course name, the number of teaching assistants for those courses during the previous year and course size for the last five years.
"Because there were simply so many of them, it didn't make sense to do it as a blizzard of small items," Patterson said.
Beckoff said course caps were decided using the highest and lowest previous course sizes. HI 1: "Europe from Rome to the Eighteenth Century" was a class that ranged from 48 to 80 students. Beckoff said the cap was set at 80.
"The subcommittee reviewed these recommendations and then made our own judgment calls based on the number of requested (teaching assistants) and the past enrollment of the courses," Beckoff said.
Enrollment may still be flexible if a course's enrollment is unusually high, Bergeron said. She added that methods could include redistributing teaching assistants within a department and using waitlists during shopping period in case pre-registered students drop the class.
"Our main goal is to help departments to plan properly (and) give students the flexibility they need," Bergeron said.
Patterson said courses that seek enrollment restrictions due to limited faculty available are initially referred to the dean of the faculty, "the obvious point being that the only answers to that question would be under the purview of the dean of the faculty."
Beckoff said he expected the approval process will be much less hurried in the future, and Thursday's meeting was an exceptional case because courses needed to be capped before Banner is used during pre-registration in April.
"I read it simply as we have this problem of subduing the monster, and this was simply an efficient way," Patterson said of the unorthodox procedure.
Though he said Bergeron's tendency during the meeting to cap courses at their maximum possible size was "very reassuring," Beckoff said he believes "having course limits does put some restrictions on the freedom that we value in the Brown curriculum."
"We'll want to move back to having student and faculty involvement in making these decisions," Beckoff said.
Though Banner has been described as making it easier for professors to cap courses, Patterson said he has not seen signs of departments taking advantage of the new system.
"I really think the rumor of massive course limitations is just that," he said. "I have not seen any sign of an avalanche of cap requests."
Bergeron said the CCC's method for dealing with course caps could again be altered once the University has a better idea of how Banner is working.
To accommodate these possible changes, the CCC will meet in April to determine course caps for the 2008 spring semester.
"I see a lot of problems with Banner, but paranoia about caps isn't one of them," Patterson said.
