The Faculty Senate unanimously approved a resolution encouraged by Chancellor Mark Emmert on Wednesday to support his “minor but important modification” to the admissions requirements for freshmen entering in 2005.
Emmert is proposing to increase the ACT score requirement for entering freshmen from 21 to 22.
The Faculty Senate Admissions, Standards and Honors Committee conducted a study analyzing how many students would not have been admitted in 2002 with the proposed 2005 standards, alumni professor and ASH committee member Teresa Summers said.
Only 209 out of 4,844 freshmen would not have been admitted in 2002 if the increased standards were administered, Summers said.
The University is moving toward a more all-encompassing approach in admitting students, so the students who would not have been automatically admitted could have possibly gotten in under different standards, she said.
“We’ve set the admission standards since 1988, and it is my personal opinion that we have the opportunity to increase the standards, so we should take it,” Summers said.
The ASH committee also projected the TOPS ACT requirement in 2005 would be 21, she said.
“We should be ahead of the game,” Summers said.
There will be a fair number of students who qualify for TOPS but do not get into LSU, Emmert said.
Emmert will be presenting the proposal to the Board of Supervisors with the Faculty Senate’s support.
In other business, Neil Mathews, vice chancellor of Student Life, spoke about the NCAA accreditation process.
The accreditation has been a yearlong and open process of looking at the University’s Athletic Department, Mathews said.
“This is not an investigation,” he said. “We’re just opening the hood and kicking the tires.”
Emmert extended an invitation to faculty to serve on the athletic council to produce faculty input. It would be impossible to have athletic council meetings without a certain number of faculty members present, he said.
Sen. Paul Hoffman also spoke about what progress the ad-hoc committee is making on producing a resolution to create a venue for faculty to evaluate administrators.
Sen. Carruth McGehee reported on the progress to revise the policy statement dealing with faculty tenure.
Another draft to this policy statement will be produced and presented to the Senate in April.