CEPP Meeting Minutes
16 September 2026, 15:10–16:10 @CIS 265
Present: Adrian Bautista (DoS/VPSA), Yelena Biberman (Faculty), Kim Frederick (Faculty), David Howson (Faculty), Ryan Richard Overbey (Chair), Javier Perez-Moreno (Faculty), Kelly Sheppard (Assessment), Kate Sterling (SGA VPAA), Natalie Taylor (Interim DoF/VPAA), Jamin Totino (Learning Commons)
Absent: None
Guests: Kerry Nelson (Institutional Research), Joe Stankovich (Institutional Research)
Scribe: Kim Frederick
Agenda items:
Approve minutes from 2026-09-09
The minutes were approved as written.
Announcements and updates
FEC needs to know whether we need any new members of CEPP for next year. Please let the chair know by tomorrow (9/16) if there are any leaves anticipated.
The SGA rep is still looking for a second SGA rep for CEPP.
Chair’s report from 2026-09-11 IPPC meeting
Nothing to report; the first meeting was about setting ground rules for the committee. IPPC is advisory to the President. The agenda will start at the next meeting.
Adoption of 2026–2027 Operating Code
The administration was asked about including policies in our operating code. We have decided to move the policy on recording out of the operating code and onto the website.
No additional changes were made beyond those circulated prior to the meeting, and minor clarifying/stylistic changes made by the chair.
The committee approved the operating code. The chair will communicate this to FEC.
Proposed Rule Changes to Accreditation from the US Department of Education [Kelly Sheppard]
Materials were circulated before the meeting that cover the federal government’s proposed changes to accreditation focused on impacts on academic affairs. These changes covered program viability, grades and learning, transfer credit presumption and prior learning, return on investment, post-graduate outcomes, program-level outcomes, program length, academic freedom and intellectual diversity, financial cost-benefit analysis (tied to key performance outcomes) and accreditor choice.
Update on Online Course Ratings Rollout [Joe Stankovich and Kerry Nelson]
Joe and Kerry have been working hard over the summer to get everything up and running. Banner is now linked to SmartEvals. We have now transitioned to SmartEvals. Have decided on mailings, frequency, linking theSpring to SmartEvals, talking about guidance for faculty (what our part is in this) and training for faculty on how to read the SmartEval reports. Thanks to everyone for working on this.
Discussion of outstanding Online Course Ratings elements
Questions about the frequency of reminder emails-vendor recommends 21 day. We can only get 19 days between Thanksgiving and the beginning of finals. The concern was raised that students should be on campus but that isn’t possible and still have a large window for students to respond. Faculty won’t be able to control when students fill this out and it could be with 2 weeks before the end of the semester.
The departmental long forms/qualitative feedback forms will still be administered the way that they always are. It was brought up that there are a number of problems introduced by having a hybrid model including perhaps introducing even more bias into the responses. SmartEvals can take a common set of questions pretty easily.
Institutional research asked whether we might review the quantitative questions as well as some point.
CEPP reviewed IR‘s new website for student ratings of courses and teaching. We discussed the instructions that CEPP had written last year and did not make any additional changes.
CEPP also reviewed the SmartEvals automated emails for faculty and students and did not suggest additional changes.
IR has asked CEPP to think about the best way to communicate to the Skidmore community that SmartEvals is live; CEPP will workshop some language and will also remind faculty when we describe CEPP’s agenda at the October faculty meeting.