MINUTES FROM THE CURRICULUM MANAGEMENT AND POLICY STEERING COMMITTEE MEETING
June 9, 2009 at 7:00 a.m.
Members Present:
Newton, Chair,
Bashford,
Stewart,
Stone,
Verma,
Yankaskas
TOPIC
Information Items
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Byerley,
Chaney,
Chhotani,
Cross,
Dent,
DISCUSSION
Budget – The House proposed budget has a 5% cut of salaries
and 11% overall as well as many other cuts for UNC. Now,
we’re in the final phase of the House budget compromise and
proposed tax increase.
Renovations – Our target finish date is 7/31. We have 13 small
rooms and 7-8 medium sized rooms. We’re now beginning to
outfit them plus Berryhill. Berryhill fourth and fifth floors look
nice.
LCME has been notified about the Asheville campus; and
informally, that has been accepted. We’ll need to do a LCME
consultation for the Asheville campus and probably also for
Charlotte later on.
Cross Project recommendations have concluded. We will
explore Sakai; and push for the institutional IS agreement
regarding PeopleSoft as well as extending one45.
Kudos to Alan and Kathleen for putting together an impressive
Academy of Educators’ meeting and workshops. Attendance at
workshopsworkshop was great – 60. Overall feedback was
excellent.
Asheville Status – Four students will go out on 7/1 after the
transition course. The first 12 weeks are Surgery and
Obstetrics/Gynecology. Good work is being done on the
curriculum. Surgery core lecture capture has had some
technical problems but we’re moving ahead as best we can.
Studying for the boards in Bondurant has worked well. There’s
been heavy student usage of Bondurant.
Introduction to Acute Care is moving forward. Frances Smith
will be the course director. It will be Pass/Fail and we’ll use
clinical logs to keep track of things. Frances and the other
Farrell,
Ingersoll,
Rao,
Roberts,
Shaheen,
ACTION ITEMS
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Extension of One45
for Next Year
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course directors have worked out a minimum set of required
experiences for the rising juniors with the understanding that
this list will evolve on an annual basis.
The ICM leadership has come up with a series of changes in
the course for next year. Separately, the overall strategic issues
for ICM will be addressed by the group.
We’re moving forward with a full scale pilot of the clinical log
given that that will be a key structure for ongoing curriculum
redesign. An introduction will be embedded in the transitions
course and the clerkship directors will be using it to track
experiences that their students have. The longer set will be used
to explore student experiences in more detail in Asheville (and
a smaller group). Tim Farrell, Julie Byerley, and Dale Krams
are leading this process.
The key focus will be the extension of faculty evaluations in
initially Molecules to Cells and possibly also Clinical
Epidemiology and then spreading. Dale Krams and the course
directors of the courses are doing a lot of work designing the
evaluation tools.
Other comments/questions included:
o How does this fit into the overall Cross Project
changes? One45 will do faculty evaluations and
potentially others.
o Sakai will take over the functions of CMS.
o We need to interact with PeopleSoft vis-à-vis core
functions like registration and transcripts.
o A suggestion was that if we’re going to have to enter
course schedules twice, can we consider doing
everything in One45.
o One45 will need to understand that these are our data – 
we can access them if they go out of business, that
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they’ll work with us around several development issues
thatthey will ensure they will be able to give reports
back in an important way.
o Evaluations require a picture of the faculty member.
We’ll work with the departments and the School of
Karen will be negotiating this with them.
K. Stone and OME will follow up with
pictures.
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NBME Action Plan
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Medicine to get these pictures – course directors don’t
have easy access to them.
CC1 has considered this. Board type questions are harder to do 
in CC1, although there needs to be vertical integration, as
before.
CC2 – An issue has just turned up with the course directors
feeling empowered to alter questions. A key issue is getting
skills and board question writing.
Other comments included:
o The USMLE has a good workbook on requirements for
courses as well as sample exams. We will find and
distribute that to faculty.
o How have other schools done the board preparation
issue? It’s useful to find out what other schools are
doing.
o What did we learn from the Neuroscience exam? First,
the curriculum for Neuroscience doesn’t exactly fit our
curriculum which is expected and not a bad thing.
Also, students really appreciated using board type
exams and format.
o Kaplan courses will cost $4000-$5000 for students, out
of range for our loan package. They are also well suited
for doing this and there’s an off the shelf product which
would be hard for us to duplicate, at least initially. The
training program that many students are using this year
is $1000. Our current loan package covers $500 but we
need to get feedback from the third year students – what
worked well.
o Lessons – One of the lessons from the clinical
clerkships and the excellent performance of the clinical
clerkships on their national exams is that they are taking
board type exams the entire year.
Consensus around the following elements:
o Faculty and especially course
directors’ development around item
writing, probably in a combination of
exposure to USMLE materials
including some exams as well as
perhaps some workshops.
o Certainly, course directors are a key
first group. We need to empower
them and make them responsible for
quality of exam.
o We think that providing a formal
board prep at end of course year does
not make sense. It’s a personal
choice and we should not provide it
for all students. We can facilitate
that process.
o We should consider slight increase in
loan package allowed to cover
modest costs of board prep.
o It would be helpful to get some input
from the third years after this process
about which pieces work best.
o We need to think about multiple
modes of evaluations. Objective
structured exams are not the only
way to do that.
o It will be important to balance the
message that it’s important but not
the only thing.
o We need to relook at our policy for
identifying students at risk and make
sure that it fits into our overall
pattern.
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Curriculum Plan
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Next Meeting
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Version 2.0 for feedback had some typos which will be
corrected.
Clarifications:
o The new committee will be named the Curriculum
Committee.
o Year 3/4 Curriculum Committee leaders will be
represented but we will also get formal input from year
4.
o It’s important to have input from rank-and- in file
teachers as we go forward and we need to think about
that.
o The Curriculum Committee will have a retreat in
August. Newton will finalize the members and set up
the retreat in the near future.
Please note that a different assistant, Sinclair Vernon, will be
taking over some of the administrative work vis-à-vis
supporting this committee. Her email is:
vernons@email.unc.edu. She will be working closely with
Chris.
Thursday, July 9, 2009, 7-8 AM, 4038 Bondurant Hall.
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Newton will invite remaining members of
curriculum committee to participate and will
organize the retreat for the end of the
summer.
H:\faculty\n\newton\2009\EAD\CMPC minutes 6 9 09.doc
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