Provost Gronert advised the UC on his approach to handling the problem of smoked-out finals in the NWQ and the possibility of winter storms causing a snow emergency on Thursday or Friday. In particular, he is considering trying to reschedule the NWQ finals on Thursday rather than Friday, which the UC agreed made sense. The administration will monitor the weather situation and determine whether to cancel in-person finals Thursday and/or Friday. If finals need to be cancelled due to inclement weather Thursday, they will probably need to be rescheduled into the new year, unless instructors can move them online.

The UC also discussed with Gronert some issues regarding the Testing Center. It was transferred from the Registrar’s office to UITS, and in the process lost all support staff, resulting in being reduced to a single employee. These changes have made it much more difficult for faculty to get support of ScanTron™ grading of examinations. Furthermore, there seemingly have been problems with online course evaluation invitations not being received by students within some units this semester. UC members were additionally concerned that it appears that tacit policy decisions (strongly discouraging in-person exams or evaluation) seem to have motivated the move.

Another issue brought up in discussion with the Provost is how faculty can know whether they have completed all their required trainings. Ideally the my.wisconsin.edu page would list all required training and for each one, whether it was completed. The UC was alerted to a case of one faculty member who has been told that they haven’t done the training although they have screenshots showing completion. More details are needed, but in general it can be difficult in some cases for an employee to determine their completion status.

Lastly, Boyland led a discussion of revisions to FD 2137 and received feedback on how the SSEA process might be revised. He will bring back a fuller draft for continued discussion at a later UC meeting.

UC meetings for December 27 and January 3 are cancelled, and Jan. 10, 2023 is tentative.