BILL ANALYSIS
AB 2203
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Date of Hearing: April 21, 2010
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Felipe Fuentes, Chair
AB 2203 (Solorio) - As Amended: April 8, 2010
Policy Committee: Higher
EducationVote:9-0
Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program:
No Reimbursable:
SUMMARY
This bill encourages the governing boards of the California
Community Colleges (CCC), the California State University (CSU)
and the University of California (UC) to review and revise their
student transfer policies to ensure that students may continue
to use textbooks regardless of the publication date for as long
as the textbook is available and the information provided is
current and reflects contemporary thinking.
FISCAL EFFECT
Minor absorbable costs for the segments to review current
textbook policies and to consider, and potentially implement,
any changes in policy.
COMMENTS
1)Background . To have a CCC course approved for general
education credit at CSU or general education and elective
credit at UC, CCC articulation officers submit course
information to the UC and CSU system offices. UC and CSU
faculty, staff and administrators evaluate the information and
forward their respective decisions to CCC articulation
officers.
In January 2010, the Guiding Notes for General Education
Course Reviewers-developed by UC and CSU staff-were released.
The Guiding Notes indicate that courses and textbooks should
be current and reflect contemporary thinking of the
discipline, and at least one text (for some disciplines, all
texts) should have been published within the last five years.
AB 2203
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For CSU, the Guiding Notes are used as guidelines in approving
courses for transfer and are not firm requirements. While the
UC Transferable Course Agreement (TCA) requires the main text
for transferable courses to be dated within five years, the
policy allows for exceptions when there are specific reasons
why a certain text is not dated within five years.
2)Purpose . The previous version of AB 2203 would have required
the CCC and CSU, and requested that UC, revise their policies
to require the main textbook for transfer courses to have been
published within the last seven years. Due to faculty
concerns regarding intrusion into textbook choice and
curricular content, and given the flexibility in the current
policy, as described above, the bill was amended in the policy
committee to simply encourage the segments to review their
current textbook policy.
Analysis Prepared by : Chuck Nicol / APPR. / (916) 319-2081