A faculty meeting was held in Sudakoff on Wednesday, Nov. 18. A committee on the Council of Academic Affairs (CAA) developed a new motion passed by faculty at the meeting. The committee is the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), and its student representatives are thesis student Ganga Braun, third year CJ Lee and second-year Jade Scheinwald. The motion alters the narrative evaluation structure in an effort to streamline the process of sending transcripts to outside institutions.

Braun provided the Catalyst with a list of what students should know about the new initiative:

• Evaluations will now be split into two sections, one for external review and another for internal review.
• The external review section will be similar to the previous evaluation system in that it can be released to other institutions at the discretion of the student.
• Faculty can choose to put the majority of the evaluation there, or just put a few lines. In the latter case, most of the evaluation will go in the second internal review section. This will not be released to other institutions and is solely for review between the student and their advisor unless the student prints and mails it out.
• The appeal process for evaluations will stay constant.
• The new process will be instated with the next cohort of students, and faculty will go through training in the spring.

There are two major rationale points for switching to the new system. The first is that there is no official way to send evaluations to other institutions for medical school, study abroad, etc. In the past, students would need to go through the myNCF portal to the Student Evaluation System (SES) to print evaluations, which would get kind of messy. The second reason is that the current state of evaluations is not consistent. Braun gave examples of evaluations from previous years saying “Evaluation to follow” and spelling mistakes. The new process aims to ameliorate that issue in that professors will consider the fact they are writing to an audience rather than just the student.

Last Friday, EPC representatives hosted a discussion about the policy change out front of the ACE building. They encourage students with any questions to contact one of the representatives.