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Thursday, March 8, 2012

Reminder on graduate course approvals in ECAS

Several changes in the review, routing, and approval of 8xxx-level courses in ECAS have been made over the past two years as a result of the graduate education transition.

Effective July 2010, responsibility for reviewing and approving 8xxx-level courses (and select 5xxx-level courses in a handful of interdisciplinary graduate programs) was relocated to the colleges. The Graduate School was removed from the review and approval process for these courses.

Due to requirements of the Electronic Course Authorization System (ECAS), the Graduate School continued to pass courses through ECAS, but without review, following notification of college approval. Exempt from this change were the pre-thesis credit (8666), thesis credit (8777 and 8888), and "full-time equivalent" (8333 and 8444) registrations, which were to remain unchanged until decisions could be made about the future of these central graduate registrations.

Effective June 2011, college/dean-level approval for 8xxx-level courses (and some 5xxx-level courses in interdisciplinary graduate programs) was added to ECAS for colleges that had not previously been in the ECAS approval queue. As a result, ECAS now routes all 8xxx-level courses for college/dean-level approval before routing them to the Graduate School queue. Graduate School "approval" is still required by the ECAS system, and the Graduate School continues to submit the courses, without review, when the courses appear in its queue. The central graduate registrations remain exempt from modification, with one exception: The policy on credit requirements for master's and doctoral degrees allows programs to modify eligibility requirements for doctoral thesis credits (8888), with collegiate approval.

Programs and colleges are asked not to submit changes in the remaining central graduate registrations (courses numbered 8333, 8444, 8666, and 8777), pending decisions about these courses later this year.

If you have questions about this process, please contact the student records training & support team at srhelp@umn.edu or 612-625-2803.


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