MHEC MAKES HEADLINES

Most of you have probably read about upcoming changes in transferrability of general education couses mandated by the Maryland Higher Education Commission. President Kirwan is collecting information on the possible impact of such changes on our programs, curricula, and students, and he will be responding to the proposal later this month. The Center, with the cooperation of the CORE Committee, the System Office of Articulation, and many of our departments on campus, has recently added over 225 Maryland community college courses to the list of those accepted by College Park in its CORE program. Some of these are courses with no direct equivalent; others are courses on our campus which have not been submitted for CORE approval because of enrollment demands. We will continue to provide up-to-the-minute information on course transferability and CORE matters, and we will be working towards making any programming changes necessitated by the proposed changes.

FUNDAMENTAL STUDIES: MATHEMATICS

You may have noticed MATH courses in our TCEQ tables articulated as L1 or on a student’s ADVISE transcript as lower-level elective credit. These courses do not have exact equivalents here at College Park. They may be mostly MATH115 with a little MATH220 thrown in (or vice-versa); they may be mostly STAT100 with a little MATH110 thrown in. In all cases, they fulfill the CORE Fundamental Studies Requirement in Mathematics. University policy is to accept no course weaker than our rigorous 110/113 series. Earlier versions of our input table did not allow us to designate courses without exact equivalents as FMs; we will continue to correct the table to indicate FM as we discover these courses.

The Center wants to thank sincerely Dr. Mary Alter and her staff--Pat Wilber and Amy Peng--for their willingness to evaluate countless MATH courses from schools all over the United States and beyond. You will note that many institutions have equivalencies posted for the entire lower-level spectrum of mathematics courses, including those of a remedial/non-credit nature. In some cases, we have not yet entered course titles for these equivalencies, but we will be happy to look up and enter any one you need immediately.

TCC ON TOUR

The Transfer Credit Center Staff will make a presentation at the Upcoming Maryland Intrasegmental Education Conference: Building Connections through Articulation, March 30-31, at Martin’s West in Baltimore. If you have read our recent Newsletters, you are already familiar with the material we are covering. The Center will be closed both days, but we will be checking email.

SPECIAL NOTE TO COLLEGE OFFICES/ADVISORS

This is the time of year students seek permission to enroll in other institutions for summer study. If you approve a course which does not appear in the database, please forward the information to the Center so that when the student's transcript arrives, the equivalency will be posted automatically. Send the name of the institution, the course ID and title--we'll post it to the TCEQ screens immediately.

You may notice that many of your out-of-state transfer students come from one or two particular institutions; if you let us know which ones, we will make an effort to get the general education courses from those schools evaluated as soon as possible.

TCEQ SCREENNOTES

If you see a course ID in RED on the TCEQ screen, you should know that the database will not accomodate some specific information on the course. We have put that special information in a note file. Right now you will need to contact us to find out what is in the note; that will change when there are more notes in the system. If you would like to see an example, go to the TCEQ screen for University of Alaska at Anchorage. (Institution Code: 94401A) BIOL362 appears in red. You may note that the equivalency is ZOOL411 at College Park, but our special coursenote says that the course must be taken/transferred with BIOL361 in order to so count. Other notes may tell us that a course is scheduled to be eliminated or combined with another course, or that the credit level has been changed recently, or that the course only earns credit under special conditions. In the case of BIOL362 at Anchorage, the footnote (i.e., “lab will not transfer w/o lecture”) gives you the information you really need.

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