MCC Daily Tribune

Update on Student Attendance Policy Rollout and Updates to the CIS Language

Student Attendance Policy Rollout: At the December 5, 2019 Faculty Senate meeting, senators voted to recommend that the Provost, "reinstate the complete suspension of faculty initiated withdrawals, rather than proceed with full implementation of the Student Attendance Policy in Spring Semester 2020." To address this request, I have communicated to Dr. Nayda Pares-Kane, President of the Faculty Senate, that I will defer the implementation of the automated withdrawals until the fall 2020 semester.

Deferring the automated withdrawal will allow us time to continue to collect and assess student attendance data. In addition to estimating how many students would have been affected by full implementation of withdrawals, it will allow us to examine how the Starfish alerts and interventions impacted student success so that we can continue to improve the effectiveness of that process. In order to fully assess issues surrounding equity and attendance/withdrawals, we need to have participation from all faculty in recording attendance so we can understand and improve practices that will help our students succeed. Equity around attendance issues can only be addressed if we have the opportunity to intervene when a student veers off path.

Course Information Sheets: MCC is revising information required to be included in the Course Information Sheets (CIS) following recommendations by the New York State Education Department, SUNY, and to address some Middle States standards. I met with the chairs network about the best mechanism to assist faculty in assembling this information and making it available in a format that is ADA compliant. As a result of that conversation, we will be working with the Virtual Campus and/or Library in developing a template for this purpose. We expect that the template will be available by the end of the spring semester.

Andrea Wade
Academic Services
12/20/2019