The General Announcements represents Rice's official curriculum. Each spring and summer, before the GA is published in August for the next academic year, all academic departments and programs are asked to review their curricular listings in the GA to ensure that their information and requirements are current and up-to-date.
Rice uses CourseLeaf CAT, a comprehensive Catalog Management System designed to assist schools in maintaining their university curricular requirements and policies in an interactive format.
The Office of the Registrar (OTR) facilitates the edit process to the curricular program listings for the GA. This process includes edits and updates made in the “Programs of Study” section of the online GA. For the 2020-2021 academic year, the VPAA's Office distributed the 2020-2021 Programs of Study Edit Process memo, which included an overview of the process, key dates for each round of edits, and additional helpful information regarding the GA publishing procedures. This informational memo is available here, as well as on the VPAA Office's website under the Guidebook section.
To ensure that all information is correct, during each round of reviews (three total), departments/programs are required to review and "sign off" on their GA text for the next academic year. The final round of reviews is done by the respective Dean’s offices. During the first two rounds, each department/program is asked to review their proposed GA text and indicate on the sign-off memo that they have either:
Official sign-off requires the approval signature of the academic department chair or the approved program director.
The GA Staging Area is available here.
As part of the GA Edit Process, academic departments and programs review and send their GA updates and edits to the OTR. The OTR will then make all updates to each department or program's GA text in the system. During the three rounds of edits, each department and program is asked to thoroughly read, review, and comment where appropriate on the following areas in their unique Programs of Study pages:
From the Undergraduate or Graduate tabs, the list of programs offered by the department or program will appear. Clicking on an individual program will list the requirements for that academic program.
IMPORTANT: The review and approval of department and program curricular requirements (as found under the Requirements tab) additionally serves as “sign-off” on corresponding Degree Works scribe for all academic programs that use Degree Works (which includes all undergraduate programs of study, all graduate certificates, and select master’s degree programs). Because the curricular requirements documented in the GA are official Rice curriculum, Degree Works must match that academic year-specific curriculum as documented in the GA.
To ensure that all information is correct, during each round of reviews (three total), departments/programs are required to review and "sign off" on their GA text for the next academic year. During each round, each department/program is asked to review their proposed GA text and indicate on the sign-off memo that they have either:
Official sign-off requires the approval signature of the academic department chair or the approved program director.
After the OTR has received the sign-off memo, the OTR will update the GA Edit Status Dashboard below, tracking the Programs of Study edit process throughout all three rounds until the next year’s academic year GA is published in August.
There is a course in a requirements grid that doesn't have a URL to click for the description, and the title is not listed. Why?
This indicates that the course is currently not active for the academic year which you are reviewing the GA for. It should either be removed from the list of courses that fulfill that requirement or should be requested to be re-activated through the New Course Request Process.
I would like to edit the title for a course listed in my requirements. How do I do this?
The information for the courses listed in the requirements are being pulled in through the 2020-2021 Course Catalog. Should you want to change this information, please follow the Course Revision process guidelines. If you want to add additional details regarding a course, we can do so by indicating a “footnote and additional information.”
Some of the edits our department submitted were not processed as we proposed, why is that?
With the implementation of CourseLeaf CAT (the Catalog Management System), the OTR has been processing all proposed edits through a standardized template/style guide for consistency between academic programs. Certain terminology regarding academic credentials, as well as the formatting of some requirements may be edited according to the template.
