Mandates

Have you noticed that syllabi are now broken into practically two equal parts, course content and policies?

Policies include and are not limited to: academic honesty, disability access/services, plagiarism, grading, academic integrity, personal electronic devices, and class attendance.

While the distributed costs are not quantified as a line item that contributes to the college’s bottom-line; we can start to piece together the time and manpower it takes to ensure that department, institutional, and curriculum policies are not only present, but up-to-date every time the syllabus is handed out to a student.

The burden of addressing, maintaining, and including these policies on every syllabus, every semester, often falls on the shoulders of instructors, TAs, academic affairs, assessment, deans, and department chairs. In some cases the responsibility of evaluating and updating syllabi stretches beyond these six groups.

The Office of Legal affairs at UNC Charlotte plays a role in outlining what standard syllabus policies must be in place to meet mandates and protect themselves. Check out their 12 suggestions for effective and protective syllabus policies.

The hidden cost of meeting federal, state, and institutional mandates are not always calculated and quantifiable, they’re questionable, i.e., how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb or rather manage the policies on your institutions syllabi?

We continue to uncover the hard and soft costs of syllabus management with our syllabus management survey. Feel free to participate in this groundbreaking research by taking the 8-12 questions survey.