LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES (MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE) Program Review – 2010-11
PRIORITIES FOR THE FUTURE: NEXT FIVE YEARS Program strengths: There is an increased interest, especially in Chemistry, that may be attributed to the increasing number of students who are doing supervised research and presenting their experimental data at scientific conferences. Students are taught by well‐qualified faculty, who are active in research, to master the ability to think, reproduce experimental data, evaluate and orally present their findings to the science community. There has also been an increase in grant funding to support faculty‐supervised research opportunities for students. Since 2005, the Department of Chemistry has acquired over $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and PSC‐CUNY grants. Students have the opportunity to conduct research not only at QCC but also at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where they can meet other scientists and build their interest in the science field. In addition, funding has continued to allow for purchase of advance instrumentation like the Scanning Electron Microscope and High temperature Furnace in the Chemistry Department. Honors courses in most departments have added to the development of both students and faculty. QCC honors conferences have provided additional opportunity for students to give scientific presentations. In addition, newly developed undergraduate research courses have been implemented in the curriculum, in which students have the opportunity to earn credits toward their associate degree. The marketability of QCC graduates continues to be strong in both CUNY and SUNY programs. One of the reasons for this is that our students display scientific maturity and a high degree of adaptability towards the demands of highly competitive programs in four year colleges. All the factors above have increased the quality of applicant faculty and have made the candidate selection more difficult. Program weaknesses: Due to remediation, students are taking a longer time to graduate. A great percentage of these students often leave QCC without completing the program and earning an associate degree. The Freshman Academies have been implemented in the past year to assist with this problem by educating and assisting entering students. But it is too early to assess the success of the Academies, which should be addressed in future program reviews. The program still does not have a mission statement that has passed through any kind of discussion process. This is essential to ensure that the goals stated in the mission statement reflect a more general consensus. There seems to have been insufficient follow‐up from the last program review and subsequent action plan. For example, there is a capstone course in Chemistry, but there is nothing comparable in Mathematics, Biology, or Physics. The creation of a learning community between Mathematics and Physics has not materialized. In general, there is little documentation concerning implementation of the suggestions of the last program review or of the action plan. There does not seem to be any mechanism whatsoever to assess curricular objective 3(d): demonstrate an understanding of the professional, ethical, and social responsibilities related to the fields of natural science, mathematics, engineering, and /or computer science. Recommendations: 
There needs to be more follow‐up between program reviews. There should be a more organized coordination among the chairs of the participating departments, perhaps one meeting a year to see how the program is progressing towards specific goals and toward fulfilling its mission. It might be useful to have a coordinator in charge of the program. 
It seems that the assessment process has created a significant increase in the workload of the faculty. There should be more investigation into the effect of assessment on the faculty workload. 
Many of the articulation agreements are old and should probably be updated. 
Assessment of curricular Objective 3(d) needs to be addressed. Unresolved problems: A continuing problem seems to be the fact that many students graduate from QCC with 60 or more credits, which makes them juniors in terms of number of credits, but they find that they often must take more classes to actually be at the junior level when they transfer. One cause of this problem is that students at QCC are less prepared when they start their college education and must take more lower level courses like MA 120 (College Algebra and Trigonometry), compared to their counterparts at four‐year schools. If Objective 1 of the curricular objectives for the program is to be satisfied, steps should be taken at least to encourage students to think about their education at QCC not in terms of numbers of credits, but in terms of completing sequences of courses that will prepare them for junior‐level work. A more extreme solution would be to decrease the number of courses that result in credits, which would be very unpopular at many levels. Another ongoing problem is the success rate of students that need remediation, especially in mathematics. Students that take MA‐441 or CHEM‐151 in 2004, which corresponds to the first year of mathematics and science, have a graduation rate of 49% (129/262). The graduation rate of students in Liberal Arts and Sciences (Mathematics and Science) that place into MA‐005 is close to zero, and the course is notoriously hard to pass (during fall 2008‐spring 2009 only 37% of the enrolled students passed the course). The Mathematics and Computer Science department has been taking the issue of remediation seriously. The department has developed a modular form of MA‐005 that can be completed in four weeks and is focused on having students doing practice problems in the classroom. The new form of MA‐005 is geared toward students that have almost passed the arithmetic portion of the placement examination and essentially need to brush up their skills to pass the arithmetic portion. For the targeted students, the modular form of MA‐005 seems to be very effective, as passing rates were 23% higher than in regular MA‐005 in initial experiments. Retention rates for students taking modular MA‐005 also showed improvement. The next goal is to try new strategies for MA‐010. Work still needs to be done to find solutions for the less prepared segments of the MA‐005 population. The discussion of remediation, so far, may lead one to conclude that MA‐005 and MA‐010 are barriers to the success of students in the LS1 program. But students that pass both MA‐005 and MA‐010 still have a very poor rate of graduation; between 2004 and 2009, 232 LS1 students passed both MA‐005 and MA‐010 and only 5 graduated. This indicates that MA‐005 and MA‐
010 are not the barriers to success for science students that they are perceived to be, as students that eventually pass these courses tend to be unsuccessful anyway. More effort is necessary to steer students in need of this level of remediation in mathematics away from the LS1 program and to determine the underlying barriers these students face.