The system supplement: a report of the Georgia Board of Regents, Vol. 37, no. 1 (Jan. 2001)

Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2001
q Traditional Freshmen Have Risen to the Challenge of USG's 2001 Admissions Goals q Governor Appoints Two New Regents q Regents Hear Advice From John Gardner, Review 'Best Practices' In Retention/Graduation Programs q On Campus
r ASU Staffer Gets Patent On Tool for Motorists r UGA Administrator Guides Celebration r Grant Puts UGA at Forefront of 'The Next Frontier' r Cox Communications, Macon State Team to Expand Access to On-line Courses
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Traditional Freshmen Have Risen to the Challenge of USG's 2001 Admissions Goals
The Board of Regents didn't blink or budge, and students met the challenge. They worked harder and met the increased requirements for admission into the University System of Georgia's colleges and universities. Now, poised to enter its final phase of implementation, the Board of Regents' ambitious 2001 admissions policy shows signs of having improved student performance significantly.
Students, parents, high-school guidance counselors and USG institutions have heeded the clarion call for higher standards. As a result, the System's traditional freshmen are far better prepared to succeed in college than ever before: more students are taking tougher high-school courses on their way to college; fewer need remedial classes; and their SAT scores now are competitive with national statistics.
"Our colleges and universities are raising the bar and demanding more from students seeking admission," said Dr. Daniel S. Papp, Board of Regents' senior vice chancellor for Academics and Fis-cal Affairs. "In return, students are meeting the standards we set. This proves what we have asserted all along -- students will work hard to meet expectations if they are clearly articulated and support is provided."
The Board of Regents passed a strengthened Admissions Policy in 1996, implementing more rigorous requirements for recent high-school grads entering college for the first time. (Recent grads are defined as those who have graduated in the past five years.)
The policy, which also applies to transfer students but not non-traditional students, addressed several stark realities within the University System, including the fact that many students entered the System without completing the highschool curriculum needed to prepare for college-level work. Many were enrolled in man-datory learning-support (remedial) courses, graduation rates were declining, and institutional missions also did not drive admissions standards. The policy has been phased-in gradually at the University System's colleges and universities since Fall 1997. Students who entered the eighth grade in Fall of 1997 will be the first class of students fully impacted by the new standards in the Fall of 2001. The five-year phase-in process has allowed affected students time to prepare effectively to meet the new academic requirements.
Four goals were articulated for the implementation plan: increasing average SAT scores, reducing the percentage of students admitted with CPC deficiencies, reducing the percentage of traditional freshmen in learning-support courses (at a rate of 5 percent annually), and continuing to serve a diverse population. With the implementation phase-in almost completed, the System is on target to meet all four goals.
Earning applause for having made the most dramatic progress in reducing the size of their LS programs are Georgia State, Fort Valley State and Valdosta State. These institutions shrank the number of traditional freshmen requiring remedial studies an average of 10 per- cent, 9.5 percent and and 9.1 percent per year over the past four years, respectively. In fact, Papp noted that Valdosta State now admits no recent high-school graduates requiring learning support, and the number requiring such help at Georgia State represents only 0.1 percent of the student body.
The full college-prep curriculum that will be required of all traditional freshmen in 2001 includes a minimum of 16 units of academically rigorous courses -- four units of math, four of English, three of science, three of social science, and two of a foreign language. Students seeking entry into a four-year university (versus a two-year college) must complete additional courses for admissions consideration. In addition, all students must meet established minimal SAT/ACT scores and grade-point averages, with requirements set higher for access into the University System's universities.
After full implementation of the policy in 2001, traditional freshmen without the mandatory CPC and those who require LS courses will be admitted to the University System's research, regional or state universities only under special circumstances. Learning-support courses -- for those students who still require such support -- will be offered by the System's two-year colleges, which will serve as admissions access points.
How We Measure Up Since Fall 1995, the performance of traditional USG freshmen has improved in the following ways:
q 91 percent now complete the College Preparatory Curriculum (CPC), up from 76 percent in 1995;
q only 16 percent required learning-support (LS) coursework this past fall, compared to 27 percent in 1995;
q average SAT scores have jumped 31 points, from 998 in Fall 1995 to 1,029 in Fall 2000.
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Governor Appoints Two New Regents
Gov. Roy Barnes this month announced the appointments of Michael J. Coles of Kennesaw and Dr. Allene H. Magill of Dalton to the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.
Coles, founder and chairman emeritus of the Great American Cookie Company, succeeds Kenneth W. Cannestra of Atlanta in representing the 6th Congressional District. Coles serves on the board of trustees of The Walker School and Kennesaw State University, where the university's College of Business also bears his name.
An active philanthropist, Coles was honored in 1995 as Georgia Philanthropist of the Year by the National Society of Fund Raising Executives.
Gov. Barnes also recently appointed Coles to chair the Georgia Film & Videotape Advisory Board, which assists the Georgia Department of Industry, Trade & Tourism in promoting the state as a shooting location for film and television projects.
Magill, who succeeds Edgar L. Jenkins of Jasper in representing the 9th Congressional District, is the newly appointed superintendent of Dalton Public Schools. She won high praise for revamping Forsyth County Schools during her five years there as superintendent. Magill, who also served as superintendent of the Paulding County School System, has been named twice as Georgia School Superintendent of the Year, including in 2000.
A former president of the Georgia Association of Educational Leaders, Magill has chalked up 30 years in public education and is a member of the board of directors of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.
"I am grateful that these two individuals have agreed to serve on the Board of Regents," Barnes said. "Michael Coles brings a true commitment to education and a great business sense to the table. Allene Magill's years of experience in the state's school systems will make her an invaluable asset to the board."
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Regents Hear Advice From John Gardner, Review 'Best Practices' In Retention/Graduation Programs
Want happy, successful students who continue to matriculate right up until they graduate? Then, give them a terrific first-year experience, says a national expert on college retention and graduation. Ready to move from assessing the data collected during its year-long benchmarking study to identifying "best practices" for potential replication, the Georgia Board of Regents invited John N. Gardner, the distinguished professor of Educational Leadership and executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College at Brevard College, to its January meeting to address how to improve student retention and graduation rates.
The first-year experience is the key factor in a student's success in college, Gardner said, and colleges typically don't focus on this phase of student life, nor do they make fostering student success an institutional priority.
"The first year has been a period in which, until recently, all stakeholders have demonstrated a high tolerance for failure and where low performance rates are viewed as inevitable," Gardner said. "It's considered by many to be a 'weed-out' year. We have made it easy to drop out with little or no penalty,"
To correct this attitude, Gardner believes colleges must make a philosophical and a semantic shift. Instead of emphasizing "retention," campus officials need to foster student success by easing first-year students' transition to college via programs that provide:
q better advising and increased counseling services; q longer, mandatory, for-credit orientation courses; and q seminars for first-year students on succeeding in the freshman year.
Among the specific recommendations for the University System, Gardner suggested the Board of Regents may want to make the first year of college a "top priority" and develop measures to encourage and reward campuses for excellence with "first-year" indicators.
He suggested making "first-year" strategies a key charge for each University System president and creating a highpowered advisory board or task force made up of faculty, staff and students on each campus to study, monitor and evaluate first-year programs and outcomes.
The regents also studied strategies used by three System campuses that incorporate elements of Gardner's recommendations. Dr. Portia H. Shields, president of Albany State University, Dr. Nathaniel Hansford, president of North Georgia College & State University, and Dr. Barbara P. Losty, president of Waycross College, presented their retention and graduation "best practices."
For example, at Albany State University, freshmen students are involved in a year-long, mandatory program that focuses on orientation to college during the first semester and community service during the second semester.
"If students are completely immersed both in the university and the local community, they are much more successful," Shields said. A "Writing Across the Curriculum" program at North Georgia College & State University requires all students to take at least two writing courses, said Hansford, adding that this has had a positive impact on the college's high retention rates.
Retention also is the president's top priority at Waycross College. Losty has implemented programs ensuring that faculty and staff understand that "college success is everyone's business. It's easier to retain students than to recruit new ones," Losty stated. Waycross also holds workshops for faculty to help them address first-year issues and offers students an "Adults Start College" grant that pays tuition for the first course taken by non-traditional students.
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ASU Staffer Gets Patent On Tool for Motorists
A member of Albany State University's Plant Operations staff recently was awarded a patent on a small aircompression tool he designed that can fix flat tires on the spot and also can be used to power ratchet wrenches, nail guns and other pneumatic tools.
Johnny Hayes, a 50-year-old high-school dropout who has worked as a painter at ASU since 1987, said the idea for Roto Air came to him in a dream.
The air compressor can be mounted to the engine of a vehicle and wired into its electrical system. Roto Air can provide up to 120 pounds per square inch of compressed air. So far, Hayes said, more than 180 companies have expressed interest in marketing his invention.
UGA Administrator Guides Celebration
Dr. Thomas G. Dyer, vice president for instruction and associate provost at the University of Georgia, served as the chairperson for the Committee for the Celebration of 250 Years of Representative Government in Georgia.
With support from UGA's Carl Vinson Institute of Government, the committee planned a special program held during a joint session of the Georgia General Assembly on Jan. 8. In addition to the reading of a commemorative resolution, remarks by Speaker of the House Thomas B. Murphy and a reading by Georgia Poet Laureate David Bottoms, the program included the reopening of the Georgia Capitol Museum following extensive renovations. Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor presided over the ceremony.
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Grant Puts UGA at Forefront of 'The Next Frontier'

The University of Georgia's interest and investment in protein research is paying off.
A team of scientists led by internationally respected UGA biochemist B.C. Wang has received one of seven grants awarded nationwide under a $150 million initiative funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The team -- the Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics -- will receive $4 million this year and nearly $24 million over the next five years, according to Wang.
The consortium also includes scientists from Georgia State University, Harvard Medical School, the University of Alabama-Huntsville, the University of Alabama-Birmingham, the Oklahoma Medical Foundation and Research Genetics, Inc., a private firm.
The NIH research initiative aims to take the new science of gene mapping, or genomics, a notch higher -- mapping the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Genes direct the manufacture of proteins in the body, and those proteins control many of the biological processes in humans and other organisms.
But there is relatively little understanding of the workings of proteins, according to another principal researcher in the project, Jim Prestegard of UGA's Complex Carbohydrate Research Center. The new reasearch could lead to the ability to custom-design medicines or a better understanding of how cancer progresses, Prestegard said.
Wang is an expert in X-ray crystallography, which involves mapping the three-dimensional structures of protein and other kinds of crystals using X-rays. His team will focus on developing and testing experimental and computational methods for mapping protein structures. This will enable them to make advances in technology development.
"We believe study will lead to a dramatic improvement in the speed at which we can determine the structure of proteins," said Wang. "We see this as a logical and important next step in the study of the human genome."
Prestegard and Wang said the grant is the result of the millions of dollars UGA and the Georgia Research Alliance have invested over the past several years in "structural biology," the study of proteins and other biological compounds at the molecular level. Other research groups in the $150 million NIH program include the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Rockefeller University, Rutgers University and the Scripps Research Institute.
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Cox Communications, Macon State Team to Expand Access to On-line Courses
Macon State College and Cox Communications have joined forces to expand access to higher education in Middle Georgia.

Through one of the first partnerships of its kind in the nation, Central Georgians will have high-speed access to on-line credit courses at Macon State and to University System of Georgia resources such as Georgia G.L.O.B.E. (Georgia Learning Online for Business and Education) and GALILEO, Georgia's electronic library system.
"In the age of learning -- the Information Age -- continuous access to education and training is an imperative for individuals and communities to prosper," said Dr. David A. Bell, president of Macon State College. "The partnership between Macon State and Cox will produce a world-class electronic learning environment of superb quality, easily accessible to the citizens of Central Georgia. This is an extraordinary resource for our entire community."
Under the partnership, Cox will extend its broadband infrastructure directly into the MSC campus network, creating a rich, new Internet-based educational environment called COX@MaconState. Construction of a direct fiber link to the campus in order to set up a local area network is still in the planning stages, but the 300-400 students expected to sign up for COX@MaconState will have interim access to the on-line courses via the Internet.
"We are excited to be partnering with Macon State on this program," said Chance Russell, director of marketing and sales at Cox. "Access to higher education is crucial if we are to bridge the digital divide that exists in the Middle Georgia area. It is a key ingredient in the realization of a great many opportunities for our region -- ranging from the creation of 21st century management and technical talent for our existing businesses, to attracting new, viable industry to our region."
Students, faculty and staff who take advantage of the discounted rates Cox is offering will be able to access the Internet up to 100 times faster than they can now and take advantage of the increasingly rich media used in on-line learning, such as video and audio streaming, real-time lectures, high-quality graphics, photographs, music and film.

BOARD OF REGENTS
Glenn S. White Lawrenceville CHAIR
Hilton Hatchett Howell, Jr. Atlanta VICE-CHAIR
Juanita Powell Baranco Lithonia
Hugh C. Carter, Jr. Atlanta
Connie Cater Macon
Michael J. Coles Kennesaw
Joe Frank Harris Cartersville
John Hunt Tifton

Charles H. Jones Macon
Donald M. Leebern, Jr. Columbus
Allene H. Magill Dalton
Elridge W. McMillan Atlanta
Martin W. NeSmith Claxton
J. Timothy Shelnut Augusta
Joel O. Wooten, Jr. Columbus
James D. Yancey Columbus

OFFICERS
Stephen R. Portch CHANCELLOR
Gail S. Weber SECRETARY TO THE BOARD
William R. Bowes TREASURER
The System Supplement
Arlethia Perry-Johnson ASSISTANT VICE CHANCELLOR
John Millsaps COMMUNICATIONS & MARKETING DIRECTOR
Diane Payne DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS
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