By MARTY LEVINE
New guidelines for how and when students can use course credits for two different degrees earned simultaneously or sequentially at Pitt drew questions but general satisfaction at the April 18 meeting of the University Senate’s Educational Policies committee.
Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Amanda Godley brought two documents to the committee for review: the new Credential Overlap Regulation, on which the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Programs (PACUP) has been working for a year, and new definitions for terms such as distance education, distance education course, fully online program and hybrid program.
They are an attempt to replace “many different guidelines,” Godley said, for when courses can count toward more than one academic degree.
The new guidelines are also an attempt to eliminate instances encountered in the past, “where we have known students get snagged by the weird” or conflicting rules, said Adam Lee, vice provost of undergraduate studies.
The aim was to take different degree pathways that are concurrent, sequential and/or accelerated and overlap in some manner and standardize them, he said.
The new regulations would remove the current requirement for students to earn a minimum of 150 new credits to get a second undergraduate degree, which “won’t pose an accreditation problem,” Lee said.
It also would remove the current limitation that graduate students can only overlap two credentials by six credits. In addition, undergraduate students taking courses that they hope to count toward a graduate degree may do so in their last undergraduate year under the new regulations, not just in their last undergraduate semester, as current rules say.
John Stoner, committee co-chair and history faculty member in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, asked whether the new regulations affected students’ ability to earn a second bachelor of arts or second bachelor of science in the same school, which is currently disallowed. Lee said this stricture would remain in place — these are instead double majors, he explained.
Godley said that the new definitions related to distance education, as required for accreditation and by federal regulations, mostly duplicate federal definitions and “will allow us to better market” hybrid programs.
She also reported that, as of April 16, PhD admissions were down 12 percent over last year at this time, due to both “conservative program offers to students” and the effort by the federal government to revoke the legal status of more than 1,500 international students. (Most of those who were affected had their legal status restored on April 25.)
Asked by Stoner whether Pitt could yet tell whether the latter move was having an effect, Godley replied that she was aware, “anecdotally,” that several graduate associate deans had reported cases of students “choosing other countries” for their studies.
Godley also said that “admissions to master’s and professional programs are actually up year to year by about 7 to 8 percent,” although it was too early to know if that increase will remain by the fall.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.