The Council on Academic Affairs is looking to downsize itself by shrinking its membership from nine to eight members and from three student members to one.

They are doing this because the school has lost faculty over the past year, while the membership requirements of the CAA and other councils and senates have remained the same.

The number of students allowed to participate has also dropped because the CAA usually does not get many students who want to participate.

The CAA also voted on adding a Clinical Rotations course during their meeting Thursday afternoon.

The CAA heard a testimony from Dr. Britto Nathan of the biological sciences department about a new course proposal. The new course being proposed is called Clinical Rotation.

This course will help students get critical thinking skills as well.

Students in the class are required to spend three hours a week in a hospital and write a one-page paper on their experience. The paper will be about what they observed, how patients were diagnosed, conditions, treatment options and the treatment plan decided by the doctor and the patient.

“The purpose of this course is to give students hands on experience,” Nathan said.

Classroom time is also required, where students will make a PowerPoint version of their paper and present it to the class, so their classmates can ask questions about what the student experienced.

“We all learn from each other. I learn from them too,” Nathan said.

The main hospital the class will work with is Sarah Bush Lincoln Hospital in the emergency rooms, but students can say they want to go to a different department or hospital depending on what they want to focus on.

One of the items they added proposed changes to their high school concurrent enrollment policy. This policy is for high school students who want to take college classes while still in high school ones.

The proposed changes are a student must be a sophomore, have a 3.0 GPA and take a maximum of seven semester hours a semester.

There will be three items that will be added to next week’s agenda from the political science department.

They are a revision of the political science major, political science major with a nonprofit leadership option and a political science major with an international studies option.

They are all requesting the same proposed changes which are dropping Introduction to Research Methods in Political Science as a requirement, have Legal Research and Argument count as one credit towards the applied political science experiment and expand the use of independent study credit.

Samuel Nusbaum can be reached at 581-2812 or at scnusbaum@eiu.edu.