Faculty who want to designate a Communication Intensive (CI) course must submit a proposal to a member of the CI Review Committee. The proposal must include a brief memo with the course title, description, and when the CI course will be offered and a course syllabus that identifies the following characteristics:

The Faculty Senate Curriculum Committee has identified the following essential characteristics for all CI courses:

• Students must complete at least two formal assignments (three or more are preferable). Successive drafts of a longer assignment, such as a design report or undergraduate thesis, may count as separate assignments. Note taking, daily logs, or journals do not count as formal assignments.
• Over the course of a semester, each student is required to compose, at a minimum, the equivalent of 15 pages (typed, double-spaced) of writing done outside class. In determining the extent to which an oral presentation meets this requirement, one rule of thumb is that it can take speakers approximately two minutes to present the amount of information contained on one page of typed text. (This assumes that the lines of type are double-spaced.)
• Each student is assessed on his or her ability to communicate orally and/or in writing. For group projects, assessment of individual students might entail such strategies as the following: assigning grades to each individual for his or her part in an oral presentation; basing individual grades for a lengthy report not only on the overall quality of the report but on each individual's work on a section for which he or she is the principal author; asking students to write an explanation of how their portion of the group project displays communicative competencies listed below.
• Grades on formal assignments count for at least 25% of the final grade for the course.
• Grades on the formal assignments reflect students' ability to communicate effectively as well as their understanding of course content. Invariably, instructors will want to use formal assignments to assess students understanding of course content. But a substantial portion of the grade for each final assignment should reflect students ability to display communicative competencies listed below.

Communicative Competencies

Rensselaer graduates must be able to communicate effectively in a variety of media (written, spoken, visual, electronic) and in a variety of genres (reports, proposals, etc.) Whatever the medium and genre, Rensselaer students should be able to:

• Understand the context in which they are communicating:
  • Identifying the goals of an audience for their communication
  • Using their understanding of goals and audience to choose appropriate media, language, and content
• Organize their work:
  • Establishing a clear structure or principle of organization
  • Creating effective introductory and concluding passages in which they identify their main point and set their work in a larger context
• Develop content appropriately:
  • Displaying a clear ethical sensibility (e.g., reporting data accurately, citing sources of information)
  • Asserting and elaborating on claims using evidence and reasoning that are appropriate for their audience and their discipline/profession
  • Addressing the questions and/or topics that are essential for success with a given assignment
  • Understanding, and, as appropriate, applying principles of visual communication (graphs, charts, animations, pictures) in their written or spoken word
• Edit their written work carefully:
  • Observing the conventions of Standard English (e.g., correct usage, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation)
  • Observing the conventions (e.g., terminology and page format) of a particular discipline or workplace

Review Process
All proposed courses will be reviewed by a committee that is appointed by the Faculty Senate Curriculum Committee and comprised of faculty from all five schools plus the Director of the Center for Communication Practices. This committee will:

• Determine whether syllabi for proposed courses display the characteristics indicated above
• Make a recommendation to FSCC as to whether a proposed course should be designated Communication Intensive
• Review all Communication Intensive courses at three-year intervals