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Attendance: Approximately 72
Announced Agenda: 7 items
Wednesday, January 31, 4:00 p.m., Duncan Hall 1055
Wednesday, February 28, 4:00 p.m., Duncan Hall 1055
Tuesday, April 3, 4:00 p.m., Duncan Hall 1055
Friday, May 11, 10:00 a.m., Duncan Hall 1055
President Malcolm Gillis called the meeting to order at 4:03 pm in McMurtry Auditorium of Duncan Hall. Alan Chapman served as Parliamentarian. Three guests from The Thresher were present.
1. Minutes of 05-12-00 Faculty Meeting: APPROVED as circulated in advance on the web.
2. Election of Parliamentarian: Since Alan Chapman's tenure as Parliamentarian of the Rice Faculty terminates at the end of the year, Gillis called on Ed Akin to handle the nomination of a successor. After commenting that Chapman had served exceptionally well in this position for many years, Akin recommended that he be nominated for another three year term. There being no other nominees, the faculty approved Chapman's election by acclimation. A round of applause followed.
3. Admissions, Student Financial Aid: As required by a 1997 faculty mandate, Gillis called on Phil Davis, chair of the Standing Committee on Admissions and Student Financial Aid, to summarize the demographics of the students admitted in the fall of 2000 with special emphasis on scholarship athletes. He reported that in 2000, 628 new undergraduate students were admitted, 49.7% from Texas; 30.3% were minorities; 16.9% were underrepresented minorities. 62 students were admitted as scholarship athletes (51 new students and 11 transfers), 39 by Procedure I (the highest standards), 21 by Procedure II, and only 2 by Procedure III. These numbers were comparable with those from the previous three years. Davis showed several transparencies that compared the SAT scores, hours attempted, and spring GPAs of athletes with non-athletes. While the two groups have shown very little change during the last four years, the average Spring GPA for athletes is noticeably higher in 1999 than in previous years. Moreover, the lowest quartile GPAs of athletes has improved consistently during the last four years. This increase appears to be real and cannot be explainded by overall grade inflation.
In comments on grade inflation, Gillis reported that the average percentage of B- and lower grades given in 33 highly selective private universities was only 9%. At Rice the percentage is 17%. It appears that Rice and Cal Tech are the most reluctant schools among the group to give Ds and Fs with any consistency. He also reported on testimony he gave to the Knight Commission on the appalling growth of commercialization in intercollegiate athletics. In spite of this, Rice is often cited as a "paragon" within the group in resisting the temptation for extreme commercialization. Rice admittedly has its problems, but Gillis said "we are dealing with them."
4. Update on Languages: Gillis called on Gale Stokes to present the current status of the new Language Requirement. A three-part handout reiterating the Language Requirement (adopted April 14, 1999), defining ACTFL Standards for Intermediate-Mid Competency, and offering ten points of Clarification was distributed to attendees. These are shown as Attachments A, B, and C. Stokes described the history of development of the material in the Attachments. He also gave statistics on the performance of the incoming freshmen and transfers in the fall of 2000. Of the 685 incoming freshmen and transfers, 171 (25%) satisfied the language requirement by AP, LPT, or OPI or are taking a 300-level language course during their first semester (about half of the 171). This means that 514 (75%) have yet to satisfy the requirement. There are 866 persons currently enrolled in 100/200 level language courses, compared with 630 in the fall of 1999.
Stokes explained that the Rice goal is to achieve a leadership position in language teaching and testing. Most introductory instruction is now web-based, and experimental sections are devoted to new techniques and proficiency standards. Much greater pedagogical training is involved now than ever before, including Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI). Technology includes ExTemplate, Extension (on our own server by semester's end), and Learning Modules. Much of the material must be developed internally, and Rice is taking the task very seriously by trying to combine the best pedagogical, testing, and delivery methods into one comprehensive package. "And we are getting there," was Stokes' final comment.
Gillis called on Stan Dodds for comments about the Language Proposal. His pre-written comments that were critical of Stokes' "Clarifications" are shown in Appendix D. He felt that the clarifications went beyond what was originally passed by the faculty. In response, Stokes suggested that Dodds' comments be submitted to the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (UCC) to set up an appropriate forum for discussion. Dodds agreed and thereby requested that the entire set of Clarifications shown in Attachment C be resubmitted to the UCC for its comments to be forwarded to the faculty. At this point the Chair ruled that formal action could not legally be taken on items that had not been publicized in the meeting agenda, although there are special mechanisms available whereby the faculty could vote to override that rule. Dodds did not request such action. After comments by Jim Thompson, Alan Grob, Jerry McKenny, and others, it was agreed that the Dodds proposal (Attachment D) should be submitted to the Undergraduate Committee for further study.
5. Undergraduate Curriculum: Gillis called on Jack Zammito to present a report from the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee on the Freshman Seminar and Communications/Writing requirements specified in the curriculum reform passed by the faculty in 1999. Zammito reported that the UCC had been intensely studying many aspects of this complex issue, including analyzing results from some pilot projects, but was not yet ready to submit a formal report. He did, however, promise a report in the Spring. Grob mentioned his recollection that the sense of the faculty resolution was to have faculty teach these courses. He pointed out a pilot project at Cornell in which graduate students were largely involved teaching such courses and asked if that would be the case at Rice. Zammito replied that the UCC at this point was not committed to any single viewpoint. Gillis reiterated his strong commitment to Freshman Seminars and informed the faculty that he, Walter Isle, and Terry Shepherd would teach an interdisciplinary seminar in the spring. Two of the three have faculty status.
6. Announcements: Gillis reminded the faculty of the dedication of the new Humanities building. He also highlighted several exciting web projects underway at Rice, especially in the areas of information technology and education technology. Steps are being undertaken in November to bring the entire Rice community up to date on these activities. Rice is poised to be at the forefront of international development of creative education policies. Gillis also requested advice from the faculty on issues that cross his desk almost weekly. Specifically, he would like our comments on this recent question. Suppose a large corporation [e.g. Ben & Jerry's, American Airlines, etc.] approached one of our 7 Schools and asked for permission to place their logo on that School's web page . . . of course for a fee that would go directly to that School. The advertisement would not appear on the University's web page. If the dean and all departments in that School were to support the proposal, should this be allowed as a source of revenue? Please give him your thoughts at <mgillis@rice.edu>.
Gillis mentioned that Joe Hightower's 3-year term as Secretary of the Rice Faculty will expire at the end of June, 2001. He called for volunteers who would agree to do the job for the next 3 years. Anyone interested should contact the Speaker of the Faculty Council Bob Patten [x4031, x4697, <patten@rice.edu>] or contact Hightower [x5906, <jhigh@rice.edu>] for the job description. Please also see the note at the end of the Minutes from the Faculty Meeting 05-12-00.
There being no other business, the meeting was adjourned at 5:12 pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Joe W. Hightower, Secretary of the Faculty
ATTACHMENT A
THE LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT PASSED BY THE FACULTY
ON SECOND READING APRIL 14, 1999
Each student must demonstrate competency in a foreign language. There are six alternative ways to fulfill this requirement:
1) By earning a score of 4 or 5 on the national Advanced Placement foreign language or literature tests while still in secondary school;
2) By earning on a nationally accredited standardized placement test a score equivalent of "intermediate-mid" or higher, as defined by the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages;
3) By completing with a passing grade (equivalent to "intermediate-mid" or higher) a single Foreign-Language-Across-the-Curriculum (FLAC) course that has been designed to bring students up to the required level of competence. Such courses are content-based courses in which all or some of the instruction is conducted in a foreign language;
4) By one semester of study or work abroad in a foreign-language environment, followed by satisfactory performance ("intermediate-mid" or higher) on a Rice fourth-semester equivalency examination;
5) By completing a course of instruction in an intensive summer language program (in the United States or abroad), followed by satisfactory performance ("intermediate-mid" or higher) on a Rice fourth-semester equivalency examination;
6) By completing with a passing grade (equivalent to "intermediate-mid" or higher) the fourth semester of any foreign language taught at Rice, or at an institution accepted for transfer credit.
ATTACHMENT B
ACTFL STANDARDS FOR INTERMEDIATE-MID COMPETENCY
Reading
Able to read consistently with increased understanding simple, connected texts
dealing with a variety of basic and social needs. Such texts are still linguistically
noncomplex and have a clear underlying internal structure. They impart basic
information about which the reader has to make minimal suppositions and to which
the reader brings personal interest and/or knowledge. Examples may include short,
straightforward descriptions of persons, places, and things written for a wide
audience.
Writing
Able to meet a number of practical writing needs. Can write short, simple letters.
Content involves personal preferences, daily routine, everyday events, and other
topics grounded in personal experience. Can express present time and at least
one other time frame or aspect consistently, e.g., nonpast, habitual, imperfective.
Evidence of control of the syntax of non-complex sentences and basic inflectional
morphology, such as declensions and conjugation. Writing tends to be a loose
collection of sentences or sentence fragments on a given topic and provides
little evidence of conscious organization. Can be understood by natives used
to the writing of non-natives.
Listening
Able to understand sentence-length utterances which consist of recombinations
of learned utterances on a variety of topics. Content continues to refer primarily
to basic personal background and needs, social conventions and somewhat more
complex tasks, such as lodging, transportation, and shopping. Additional content
areas include some personal interests and activities, and a greater diversity
of instructions and directions. Listening tasks not only pertain to spontaneous
face-to-face conversations but also to short routine telephone conversations
and some deliberate speech, such as simple announcements and reports over the
media. Understanding continues to be uneven.
Speaking
Able to handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated, basic, and communicative
tasks and social situations. Can talk simply about self and family members.
Can ask and answer questions and participate in simple conversations on topics
beyond the most immediate needs; e.g., personal history and leisure time activities.
Utterance length increases slightly, but speech may continue to be characterized
by frequent long pauses, since the smooth incorporation of even basic conversational
strategies is often hindered as the speaker struggles to create appropriate
language forms. Pronunciation may continue to be strongly influenced by first
language and fluency may still be strained. Although misunderstandings still
arise, the Intermediate-Mid speaker can generally be understood by sympathetic
interlocutors.
ATTACHMENT C
CLARIFICATIONS OF THE LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT
The following 10 points provide a detailed explication of the six options passed by the faculty for satisfying the language requirement. These points do not cover all aspects of the requirement, but are intended to clarify unclear aspects of the rules.
1) Passing a fourth semester language course, including courses such as SPAN 204 and CHIN 204, at Rice satisfies the requirement. As the language of the requirement indicates, passing a fourth semester language course entails demonstrating intermediate-mid proficiency.
2) Achieving a score of 6 or 7 on an International Baccalaureate higher level language exam while still in secondary school satisfies requirement.
3) If a student places at the 300 level or higher in a Language Placement Test (LPT), including the ones taken this semester, he or she opens up two ways of satisfying the requirement: a) pass at least one semester of a 300 or higher level language course that is taught in that language; or b) score high enough on an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) in that language so that the student's average skill level, when combined with the LPT, is intermediate-mid by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) standards. This determination will be made by the appropriate department.
4) The "Rice fourth-semester equivalency examination" mentioned in options 4 and 5 for satisfying the requirement is defined as achieving an average rating of intermediate-mid on the LPT and the OPI.
5) One can satisfy the language requirement in Latin or classical Greek by demonstrating intermediate-mid proficiency in reading by means of an on-campus test.
6) Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC) trailer sections carrying one or two hours of academic credit are being offered in conjunction with four courses this semester. Students in the basic course have the option of adding the FLAC trailer, but are not required to do so. The courses with trailers this semester are CLAS 222 Perspectives on Greek Tragedy (Greek); ENGL 499 Studies in Literary Theory: Proust (French); HIST 221/421 Japanese History: Early Japan to the Age of the Samurai (Japanese); and HIST 235 The World and the West (Spanish). Next semester at least four courses will be offered with FLAC trailers: HIST 250/450 Traditional Chinese Culture (Chinese); HIST 374 Medieval and Modern Jewish History (German); ENGL 387 Contemporary Ethnic Poetry (Spanish); and HIST 274 Medieval and Modern German History 1500-1948 (German). We are working hard to expand our offerings of this kind and to identify them clearly in the annual course listings
7) Normally, the languages acceptable for satisfying the requirement are those offered at Rice through the fourth semester of study (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Latin, classical Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew). An intensive effort is underway to perfect the LPTs in all of those languages and OPIs in all except Latin and Greek.
8) Students who have acquired proficiency in a language not offered at Rice through the fourth semester may satisfy the language requirement by successfully petitioning the Committee on Examinations and Standing with appropriate documentation. Those who do not have appropriate documentation must satisfy the language requirement with one of the languages taught at Rice.
9) For questions of interpretation of these rules and of the language requirement in general, students or others should consult the Dean of Humanities; for questions regarding one of the languages we teach, interested parties should consult the appropriate department; for unusual circumstances students may petition the Committee on Examinations and Standing.
10) These guidelines are posted on the web page of the Office of Academic Advising (www.rice.edu/advising).
ATTACHMENT D
WRITTEN COMMENTS ON STOKES' "CLARIFICATIONS"
by STAN DODDS
I wish to take issue with several of the proposed rules.
The faculty has not chosen to delegate any curricular authority to either a language committee or the Dean of Humanities. The Dean and his advisors are, therefore, limited to implementing the specific provisions of the faculty resolution, without addition or modification. The present 'clarifications' appear to overstep those bounds, apparently in the interests of expediency, and thereby change the substance of the faculty legislation. They should be referred to the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and then brought back to the faculty for substantive discussion and vote.
Referring to the items in Stokes' clarifications:
Item 3(a) requires certain students to complete a 300 level language course. The faculty specified that various tests or courses would satisfy the language requirement. 300-level courses were not included, and cannot be included without faculty action. If the faculty wishes to implement this new option within the language requirement, it will require a vote.
Item 3(b) attempts to define the local language proficiency test as a "nationally accredited standardized placement test." This is at variance with the faculty's statement, and poor policy.
To most, if not all of us, I suggest that the phrase "nationally accredited standardized placement test" means a test prepared by a national testing organization such as Educational Testing Service, administered and graded by their employees, validated and statistically standardized at the national level. The proposal is to use tests prepared and administered locally, with content face-validated by a paid consultant. I believe this clearly violates the intent as well as the letter of the faculty legislation. If national tests do not exist for even so common a language as Spanish, then testing is simply not an option for a student seeking exemption, and the fact calls into question contrary assertions made when this regulation was presented to the faculty.
At the policy level, the use of an online, unproctored, test of any sort to satisfy the requirement is problematic at best. There will be substantial pressure to cheat or have someone else take the test in order to evade course work. The countervailing pressures will be very weak, since the students are not subject to the Rice Honor Code before matriculation and have not generally been taught the value of academic integrity in their high school environment. An oral proficiency test does provide a weak check, but is likely to fail entirely with some students who may be sufficiently fluent speakers but illiterate. We cannot use an unsupervised test for anything but advising and placement, no matter how expedient it may seem.
Additionally, those of us with long memories recall the vagaries of the local English Composition Exam. It has never been a well-defined standard, and the pass level has often been explicitly adjusted to fit the staffing available or desired. The advantage of a truly national standard exit exam, is that it removes all suggestion of ulterior motives or expediency in forcing students into coursework or releasing them from it. The LPT/OPI system totally fails this requirement.
The proposed clarification is therefore fatally flawed, and I ask that the faculty reject it.
Items 7 and 8 attempt to more or less limit students to the idiosyncratic list of languages taught at Rice. I remind you that a pedagogically defensible limitation was suggested in the initial debate, and emphatically rejected at the urging of the language faculty. The legislation as passed therefore imposes no limits, and it is improper of the Dean to suggest otherwise in material distributed to students. It is not a question of the student petitioning or providing unspecified documentation, but rather of the language faculty providing an appropriate testing mechanism for any language requested. This may well be an impractical, expensive, unintended consequence of our legislation, but it is a logical consequence. The students are not responsible for it and should not be punished for our lack of foresight.
I ask that the faculty also reject Items 7 and 8 of the Dean's list.
Thank you.
Stanley Dodds