Graduate courses normally should be offered only under the sponsorship of academic departments or other units which are authorized to grant graduate degrees. However, in certain cases faculty members of an academic unit not authorized to offer a graduate degree or graduate certificate program may be granted permission to offer courses numbered 500 to 599 and create a new course prefix, if required.
Courses proposed under this provision should not be intended as part of a graduate degree program being developed by the sponsoring unit. Such courses should be offered under the approved prefixes of existing graduate degree programs until the new degree has been established by the Board of Regents. Procedures for authorization of new graduate degrees are described in Policy 1.7.
2.2.1 Review and Approval Process
Graduate courses to be offered by non-graduate-program-offering units must follow the regular UW course and course prefix approval process. This includes curricular review by the appropriate school, college, or campus and final approval by the UW Curriculum Committee. The Graduate School will review and endorse proposed courses and prefixes as part of the course approval workflow. The course proposers must indicate all affected units and the Graduate School in the “Potentially Affected Departments, Schools, or Colleges” section of the course proposal. These units will be asked to review and acknowledge the course proposal.
In requesting approval of courses under this policy the unit must provide a written statement, included with the course application materials, showing that each course meets the following criteria:
- The academic and budgetary impact of the course has been assessed and approved by the leadership of the academic unit and the school/college/campus.
- Instructors should be members of the graduate faculty or meet equivalent standards for scholarship and teaching experience. Provide a list of expected instructors and academic titles, including indication of graduate faculty status.
- Classes should have majority graduate or postdoctoral (as opposed to professional or undergraduate) enrollment. Provide an estimate of the total enrollment for each.
- The course should have clear interdisciplinary value in the following ways. Provide an explanation of the following criteria:
- It should extend and integrate knowledge from more than one discipline to the extent that it is not appropriately offered by a graduate-degree-offering unit.
- Its enrollment is drawn from more than one graduate-degree-offering unit.
Policy 2.2 created: March, 1987. Revised: April, 2007; February 2020