Five-day Notification of Upcoming Division Vote
Electronic Vote on March 8, 2018

Graduate Division Courses

Background Justification

The Graduate Division and its partner, the Office of Career and Professional Development, currently offer several courses for graduate students.

Because the Graduate Division is not classified as an academic department or a graduate program, its courses are either listed under a catalog subject associated with an academic program (e.g., BIOMED SCI 214: Ethics and the Responsible Conduct of Research and BIOMED SCI 285: GSICE Career and Professional Development Training -- https://coursecatalog.ucsf.edu/biomed_sci) or offered outside of the list of Academic Senate-approved courses and hence not available for credit or recorded on the student’s transcript (e.g., STEP-UP Introduction to Pedagogy, TRAIN-UP Introduction to Mentoring).

The Graduate Division is requesting permission to offer courses.  With this approval, the Graduate Division would offer and administer the Responsible Conduct of Research course.  This change would demonstrate UCSF’s institutional commitment to this training.

Currently, PhD programs other than Biomedical Sciences that are supported by NIH T32 grants (e.g., PSPG, CCB, etc.) have to explain why their students enroll in a course with the subject Biomedical Sciences. With the new Funding Opportunity Announcement for all NIGMS T32 grants, the RCR course will need to be revised and expanded into a suite of course offerings. That work will be done within the Graduate Division, in collaboration with faculty from all of the training grant-supported programs, and thus the logical home for these courses should be the Graduate Division.

For the professional development courses currently offered by OCPD, students would like their transcripts to reflect this course work so they can demonstrate acquisition of these skill sets. There is precedent in the University of California system, with graduate divisions in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Santa Barbara all offering courses related to graduate school success and professional development.

Procedural Justification

There are no bylaws prohibiting the Graduate Division from offering courses, nor is there any language granting it permission to do so. The UCSF Academic Senate received guidance from several other University of California campuses on how to proceed with this proposal.

Before being voted on by the full UCSF Academic Senate Faculty, this proposal was reviewed and approved by four Senate committees, as described below. If this proposal is approved by the full UCSF Academic Senate Faculty, language approving the Graduate Division’s ability to offer courses will appear on both the Registrar’s and Course Review websites.

This proposal was revised and approved by the following Academic Senate Standing Committees:

  • Graduate Council on 11/9/17
  • Committee on Educational Policy on 1/5/18,
  • Committee on Courses of Instruction (COCOI) on 2/21/2018 , and
  • Executive Council 3/1/2018.

All new courses will be submitted to COCOI for formal approval, consistent with COCOI’s normal course review process.

If this proposal is approved, we will request that COCOI add a new subject to the Course Catalog, effective Fall 2018.

School of Pharmacy Bylaw and Regulation Changes

Background Justification
Faculty teaching the PharmD curriculum from the School of Pharmacy currently assess students on a pass/no pass policy in 42% of the courses offered by the School of Pharmacy. During the 2015-2016 term, the School’s leadership formed cross-departmental workgroups and committees to begin planning the implementation of a new, three-year curriculum. The School’s Curriculum Transformation Team, in consultation with the Faculty Council’s standing committees, began discovery of curricular issues with an eye toward curriculum delivery and assessing student performance.

Aligning the remaining 58% of the courses offered in the PharmD curriculum under a single pass/no pass policy evolved as an effective way to assess students under the proposed curricula, while following grading systems adopted by the School of Medicine and peer institutions, including the Skaags School of Pharmacy at UC San Diego.

Beginning in the summer quarter of 2018, the School of Pharmacy will transition from a four-year, to a three-year PharmD curriculum. The new curriculum is competency-based and use of a pass/no pass grading system better aligns with this structure of education.

The Executive Council, Committee on Rules and Jurisdiction and Committee on Educational Policy reviewed the School of Pharmacy’s proposals. The faculty’s feedback on the pass/no pass grading option brought forth the following perceptions about adopting a pass/no pass grading option:

Benefits
  • Reduced stress
  • Enhanced well-being
  • Less competitive learning environment
  • Encourages collaboration
  • More reflective of principles of inter-professional learning and practice
  • Greater focus on learning (vs. higher grade)
Concerns
  • Decline in class attendance
  • Decline in overall effort
  • Decline in academic performance
  • Decline in pass rates of licensure exams
  • Reduced success in acquiring post-graduate training
  • Does not explicitly recognize excellence
Procedural Justification

On February 8, 2018, 79.6% of the faculty participating from the School of Pharmacy voted to modify sections I, III, IV & V of its regulations, which included adoption of the pass/no pass grading system with an Honors option. 89.6% voted to adopt the new three-year curriculum, and 100% voted to amend bylaws VI, VII & VIII.

San Francisco Regulation 775 establishes a letter-grade system. Therefore, the School of Pharmacy faculty request a modification to San Francisco Regulation 775, in order to implement modifications to its regulations I, III, IV & V. Adoption of the bylaw amendments and regulatory modifications are justified, as each facilitate implementation of the new, three-year curriculum to take effect in the summer quarter 2018.