Students getting their Baccalaureate degree may have new general education criteria to meet before graduation, according to items discussed in this week's Academic Senate meeting.

Susan Shimanoff, Chair of from the Graduation Requirements Task Force, gave the committee’s third update on their four-year long study concerning making changes for the first time in 25 years to the upper-division general education requirements. One part of the curriculum changes would be to change how the university deals with segment three courses.

Required general education courses could fall into three structural options: Integrated Study, study aboard and topical perspectives. These changes would meet the six educational goals that the committee designated for those graduating form SF State with a Baccalaureate degree. Once the upper-division general education requirements change, the committee plans on focusing on lower-division general education requirements. She said that the committee is rethinking the entire program from the ground up so “all would achieve the same learning objectives.”

Summer 2009 might have a new session: R4, which would last ten weeks. Ray Trautman, secretary of the Academic Senate, raised the idea of SF State offering a 10-week-long summer. A new academic calendar not including the possible new R4 session was recommended by Wei Ming Dariotis before the proposal of a R4 session.

Three changes to the Retention, Tenure and Promotion Policy were discussed. One proposed change is to increase the members of the University Tenure & Promotions Committee from five to seven members. Some senators raised concerns that having more members would cause those in the UTPC to be biased towards tenuring and promoting faculty from their own department. The second change was to add previous reports and rebuttals to the faculty’s personal file for review by the UTPC. The third change was to include the faculty member’s own department criteria to their file.