Status of Enrollment Management as of Summer 2018
OSU/CoE Policy:

Students who are making normal progress through the curriculum and meet the
requirements specified for admission to the major should, as a general rule, 
be able to enroll in the major by the end of their first year. This does not 
apply to students who do not meet the specified requirements or are not making 
normal progress, e.g., students who use grade forgiveness etc.

Summary of Current Enrollment Management Data:
* Current policy: Admit with 3.2 GPA after completion of 2221; 
or between 3.0 and 3.2 with average of 3.2 or higher in 2221, 2231, 2321; 
typically, these students are admitted to the major in the Summer term at the 
end of their freshman year;
Further, students with GPA between 3.0 and 3.2 take 2231 and 2321 in the Autumn
semester of the sophomore year. The decision for these students will be made 
at the end of the Autumn semester of the sophomore year once the Au semester 
grades are available (i.e., not at the end of their first year).

Result: 596 students admitted to the major in 12 months from Au 17-Su 18. 
This far exceeds our target of roughly 350 students each year.

Summer 18 data: 
459 students with GPA of 3.0 or above; 364 had 3.2 or higher; 
233 had GPA of 3.4 or higher.
13 of the 105 students with GPA between 3.0 and 3.2 were admitted;.
(A few with GPA of 3.2 or above were not admitted because they had not 
completed 2221 etc.)

Summary of Options Going Forward:
Reset 3.2 and 3.0 to 3.4 and 3.2 respectively; no other changes. 
This would be the simplest possibility from our point of view but may 
negatively impact students from under-represented groups. 
It will also require, as is the case now, a large number of sections of 2231 and 2321 
to be offered for students who are not ultimately admitted to the major.

Reset 3.2 to 3.4; leave 3.0 as is but add a requirement of *holistic review*.
Potential problems with holistic reviews:
a) Getting all the relevant information;
b) Amount of faculty/staff time involved in assessing all the information and
rank-ordering the students based on the assessment;
c) Ensuring consistency of the assessments (especially since different people
are likely to be assessing different applications);
d) Potential challenges (including possibly legal ones?) from students who, 
following the holistic review, are not admitted.

To get a feel for these problems, Nikki and Neelam met with a couple of 
faculty and the academic advisor from Biomedical Engineering, the only program 
in the college with any real experience with holistic reviews.  
Here is a summary of what we learned.
a) *All* BME pre-majors complete a detailed online application, in Spring.
(Note that majors are admitted to the BME program only *once* a year.)
[The BME folks shared their application with us during the meeting. 
We will have copies at the UGSC meeting.]
b) They said that they admit anyone who has above 3.6 (unless there is 
something really strange in the rest of the student's application). 
c) Roughly 80% of the admits to their major comes from students who fall under 
category (a) and the remaining 20% are from students with GPA of 3.3 and higher 
(with possibly an occasional exception below that).
d) Each faculty/staff member who evaluates student essays evaluates about 
15 of them. And takes about 3+ hours to do so (after initial training 
and getting up to speed); so it takes roughly 15 minutes for each essay 
to be evaluated.  In addition, the two academic advisors and one other 
faculty member(?) look at all the applications.
e) The final decisions are made in a meeting of the entire Undergraduate 
Committee. [Note: Roughly 120 students apply for admission to the 
BME major each year.]

The main components of the BME holistic application consist of short essay answers 
to three sets of questions: 
i) how the student's background and experiences will add to the diversity in 
the dept./field (where "diversity" is defined to mean cultural, economic, 
racial, or geographic diversity, or being first in family to attend college; 
also included is enrollment in challenging curricula, demonstrating 
special talent in a particular area, or special contributions to specific 
extracurr. activity or work experience). The student is also to include, 
as part of the answer to this question, whether his/her academic performance 
was adversely affected by such factors outside the student's control and 
whether the student is eligible for specific support services from 
OSU (such as from ODS). [300 words max. for this short-essay answer.]
ii) What attracted the student to the field [150 words max.]
iii) Long-term goals and how a BS in BME will help in achieving them 
[150 words max.]
The BME advisor holds a session, shortly before the applications are due, 
to ensure that all the pre-majors have a good understanding of providing 
suitable answers. [Also discussed in the "survey" course in the fall.]

The evaluator is asked to evaluate the student's application along each of 
these parameters on a rating of "high"/"medium"/"low"/"none" [but these 
are not converted to numerical scores]. Instead, the entire set of 
ratings of all the students is used to help inform the final discussion. 

Two final points: BME has never had a serious challenge, certainly nothing 
like a legal challenge, from a student who had been denied admission. 
Before instituting the procedure, they ran it through not just the college 
but also legal affairs to ensure that there are no problems. 

Question for our consideration: Do we want to include a holistic review in 
our process? And, if so, is the BME model an appropriate one?