WASC Proposal

This is a draft of the proposal that will be sent to David Goodstein for inclusion in the overall WASC proposal from Caltech. Our part should be between 2 and 3 pages. This text can be editted by logging on to the wiki and clicking the edit button.

Updates

• 18 Apr 06: added third topic (mentoring) plus various edits based on CCSC meeting. Changes are marked in blue, comments are marked in green.
• 16 Apr 06: first draft

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Undergraduate Education

Andrea Dubin, Marianne Bronner-Fraser, Jean Ensminger, Csilla Felsen,
Brad Filippone, Nate Lewis, Richard Murray, Niles Pierce, Josephine Suh

Overview of Caltech Undergraduate Educational Program

Caltech offers a four-year undergraduate course with "options" (majors) available in applied and computational mathematics; applied physics; astrophysics; biology; business economics and management; chemical engineering; chemistry; computer science; economics; electrical engineering; engineering and applied science; English; geobiology; geochemistry; geology; geophysics; history; history and philosophy of science; independent studies; mathematics; mechanical engineering; philosophy; physics; planetary science; and social science. Each leads to the degree of Bachelor of Science.

Option requirements are established by the faculty responsible for the given degree program and consist of a set of required courses as well as recommended couses. Each course at the Institute is assigned a number of units corresponding to the total number of hours per week devoted to that subject, including classwork, laboratory, and the normal outside preparation. The Institute requirement for a Bachelor of Science degree is 486 units, which corresponds to approximately 40 units per quarter for a period of four years.

All options require students to take courses in biology (6 units), chemistry (24 units), humanities (54 units), mathematics (45 units), physics (45 units), and the social sciences (54 units). These courses form the "core curriculum", which is required of all students regardless of their degree. Course work is rigorous and students are encouraged to participate in research. The undergraduate program is thus designed to provide an intensive exposure to a wide spectrum of intellectual pursuits.

In the first year of study, students are assigned faculty advisors based on their very rough areas of interest (engineering, physics, etc). Near the end of the first year, students select an option, and during the second year they begin to specialize. Each student is then assigned a faculty advisor within the option that they select. This is normally done without regard to a students special interests (beyond the option specialization), but students can request a change of advisor if they desire. Although the average advising load across Caltech is approximately 3-4 students per faculty member, in some of the more popular options the advising load can be as high as 10-12 students per faculty member (excluding freshmen advisees).

Caltech also encourages a reasonable participation in extracurricular activities, which are largely managed by the students themselves. Three terms of physical education are required, and intercollegiate and intramural sports are encouraged. In short, every effort is made to provide undergraduate students with well-rounded, integrated programs that will not only give them sound training in their professional fields, but that will also develop character, intellectual breadth, and physical well-being.

Teaching assignments and course evaluations are the responsibility of the individual Divisions at Caltech. Most Divisions delegate the responsibility for teaching assignments to the Executive Officer for each option, who is the faculty member responsible for the undergraduate (and also graduate) degree program in a given area. Teaching evaluations are handed out in all undergraduate courses and are returned to the Division Chair, who is responsible for faculty evaluation and raises. A new online course survey is currently being developed for courses that are part of the core curriclum, which provides more detailed feedback to instructors.

Issues for Further Study

Based on consultation with faculty, students and staff, we have identified two three specific areas where we feel that a thorough assessment of Caltech's educational program would be timely and could lead to constructive changes in the undergraduate program.

Teaching Quality

While there are many excellent teachers at Caltech, there are also examples of courses that are poorly taught and instructors who could do a much better job in their teaching performance. At the present time, there are relatively few resources available for Caltech faculty who want to improve their teaching and limited feedback mechanisms for improving the teaching effectiveness. In our initial discussions, we have identified several aspects of teaching quality that we believe should be further studied:

Course Feedback - How do faculty get feedback on their courses, both during the term and after the term? Could course surveys, web-sites and other mechanisms be used to provide instructors more information about whether the students are understanding the material and whether the teaching methods are effective?

Teacher Orientation Training - How can Caltech usefully provide information to teachers about best practices for effective teaching, available resources and technologies, and integration of the honor system into their courses?

Faculty Incentives - Are there incentives that can be provided to increase the average quality of teaching across the campus? Are there disincentives that can be provided to motivate those faculty that intentionally neglect their teaching responsibilities?

Undergraduate Workload

Another common area of concern at Caltech is the workload of the undergraduates. On the one hand, many Caltech courses are notorious for requiring more work than the number of units would indicate. At the same time, some Caltech undergraduates take a large number of units each term, creating a situation in which they have little time to integrate the material they are learning or pursue activities outside of class (including research opportunities at Caltech). Some possible aspects for further study are:

Course Underuniting - how can the number of units required for a course be accurately determined and assigned to each course? Will students be able to finish their graduation requirements if the units are increased appropriately?

Course Timing - the timing of homework, labs, exams and courses can often lead to situations in which students must choose between completing their work and attending classes and labs. Can methods for resolving these timing conflicts be identified and implemented?

Class Attendance - in some courses, the attendance in class is lower than 50%. Are there reasons for this lack of attendance and should lectures be restructured to encourage greater attendance?

Independent Study - is the structure of the Caltech undergraduate education one that allows "inspired independent study" for those students who are interested? How might research opportunities be better integrated into the curriculum requirements. (This topic overlaps with the Undergraduate Research self-study topic.)

Student Health - how is the Caltech workload affecting student health (mental and physical)? Are there changes that could be made that would provide less stress on students while maintaining Caltech's rigorous educational program?

Student Advising

[RMM: This came up in the CCSC meeting and there was a lot of resonance with looking into this.]

The low student faculty ratio at Caltech (approximately 3:1) allows undergraduates to have a much richer interaction with their faculty advisors than might be possible at a larger school. However, there are challenges within the structure of Caltech that can lead to less than idea situations. One issue is that students are not uniformly distributed across Caltech's departments, so while the student/faculty ratio might be low in some areas, it can be quite high in others (e.g., in recent years the EE faculty have averaged 12 student advisees per faculty member, not including freshmen). In addition, the intense research focus at Caltech provides opportunities for some students to get involved a faculty lab during their studies, but some students complain that faculty to not spend adequate time on their advising activities. Some possible areas of study include:

Advising load

Advisor training

Advisor assignments

Advisor feedback

Other Issues

In addition to these broad issues, there are a number of more specific items that we would like to collect information about and consider as possible components of the self study on undergraduate education:

• Classroom experience (across the variety of courses that students take)
• Might touch on tools (eg, MATLAB), breadth of the core
• Look into student health? Compare to other universities
• Perhaps link to research and honor system topics
• Course attendance, classroom experience and *learning*
• Can we find out why students aren't coming to class?
• Focus on what students learn?
• Content of the core

Core Evaluation - is the core curriculum providing the information required for later courses? If we look at the students that are graduating from Caltech, does the core provide the background that they need?

Proposed Approach

Collect information through survey data, polling people on campus (both faculty and students). Present the data to faculty and students to generate more discussion and come up with solutions. Have committee on Undergraduate Education in the upcoming Student Faculty Conference to make this a more broad Caltech campus discussion.

Course surveys

Class surveys - freshmen and seniors

Requirements analysis

Benchmarking