Concepts and Terms

Academic Requirements Outlines reflecting the current structure of academic programs are posted in the current Loyola University Chicago Academic Catalog, at the Curriculum tab of the academic program in question. This information is what the Academic Requirements Report (ARR) in LOCUS is programmed to look for in students’ course-records, tracking their satisfaction of Core and other requirements, including the major(s) and minor(s, if any) they have declared. (For advising purposes, please recall that students are subject to the requirements programmed for majors and minors as of the time they declare them in LOCUS: students who declare a given major/minor in different academic years may be subject to different requirements for it.) The same information will automatically populate a new Edit Program request initiated in CIM's Program Management portal, as the basis for editing the request to reflect the changes desired. (Requested changes in an existing academic program will be updated in the Catalog, and reflected in the program's updated Academic Requirements Outline, for the academic year in which the changes are finally approved to become effective.)

The Academic Requirements Report is the function in LOCUS that reads students’ course-records so as to track their satisfaction of Core and other requirements, including the major(s) and minor(s, if any) they have declared. Students may check their own ARRs in their Student Centers in LOCUS; their registered Advisers may run students’ ARRs at the Advisee Student Center in LOCUS. Please recall that students are subject to the requirements programmed for majors and minors as of the time they declare them in LOCUS: students who declare a given major/minor in different academic years may be subject to different requirements for it.

Academic Units in the College of Arts & Sciences are either departments or interdisciplinary programs formally so constituted: the term refers to the organizational structure framing faculty-members’ relationship to the academic enterprises in which they participate within the College. Both departments and interdisciplinary programs oversee major(s) and/or minor(s), and some departments oversee interdepartmental major(s)/minor(s) jointly. Sometimes it is convenient to refer to the overseeing entities by an inclusive term.

• An active course may be scheduled, and appears in all displays of the Course Catalog in LOCUS as well as in the University Catalog.
• An inactive course is not available for scheduling; inactive courses do not appear in LOCUS's Browse Catalog.
• Registration & Records inactivates a course either by making its “status” Inactive rather than Active, or by un-checking its “allow course to be scheduled” box, or both.
• The College's Academic Council has authorized requests to inactivate unused courses to be directed to the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, for administrative action and reporting into Academic Council minutes: these requests do not require action by the Council. (Some inactivations, however, may require approval by more university-wide entities in the workflow.)
• Inactivate courses may be looked up in CIM's Course Inventory Management platform, by the Status, "Inactive." A request to re-activate an inactive course can be initiated by selecting the course from the Results window's list and clicking on its green "Reactivate" button. Edit the form as needed to update the course appropriately, and click the START WORKFLOW button to launch.

• In the context of the CAS Academic Council’s collective oversight by faculty of curricular matters in the College, the term application may refer to a curricular request or to the CIM request form on which the application is submitted for the Council’s review.
• A group of applications that have been bundled and submitted together in CIM may be called an application-package.
• The CIM System receives applications of the following types and generates workflows for them:
  • the Course Inventory Management portal, https://nextcatalog.luc.edu/courseadmin/, receives and processes applications for new courses and for changes in existing courses. (Please note that a request to include in an interdisciplinary major or minor any course not previously included in it, will require both a change-request for each major or minor seeking to add the course, and a change-request to add the interdisicplinary tag to the course.)
  • the Intent Request Management portal, https://nextcatalog.luc.edu/intentadmin/, receives and processes the applications required since academic year 2023-24 as a preliminary step for all proposals of new academic programs. Only once an Intent request is approved, will the Provost's Office invite its submitters to proceed with full-scale new-program development in accordance with their Guidelines; the next step will be to submit a full proposal through the CIM's Program Management portal.
  • the Program Management portal, https://nextcatalog.luc.edu/programadmin/, receives and processes applications for new academic programs (but only after the corresponding Intent Request has been approved and the Provost's Office has invited the submitters to develop it and make a Program Management request) and for changes in existing majors, minors, or other academic programs. (Please note that a request to include in an interdisciplinary major or minor any course not previously included in it, will require both a change-request for each major or minor seeking to add the course, and a change-request to add the interdisicplinary tag to the course.)
  • the Policy Management portal, https://nextcatalog.luc.edu/policyadmin/, receives and processes applications for academic policies to be published in the University Catalog, variously under the authority of specific academic programs, departments, interdisciplinary programs, campuses, Schools, and the University as a whole. The appropriate workflow for each application will be generated according to the jurisdiction(s) for its approval. New policies, new articulations of existing policies, and changes in existing policies must alike be submitted as Policy Management requests.
  • the Miscellaneous Request Management portal, https://nextcatalog.luc.edu/miscadmin/, receives and processes requests for other academic matters covered by the Chart of Reviews and Approvals for Academic Matters but not by the above request-types in CIM.
• At present, Temporary Tag/Cross-List Requests to credit, on a semester-specific basis, a specific class-section of a course not otherwise included in a given major or minor are to be submitted via e-mail to the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs on the form required. Please e-mail the Associate Dean for the form and instructions.

The term approver applies to each individual designated in CIM to sign off at a particular "stop" in CIM's workflows on behalf of a particular entity:

• Approvers bear the responsibility to secure the appropriate consensus of the entity they represent, in conformity with its internal rules and processes, before signing off.
• CIM sends approvers notification to check the Approve queue when one or more applications has reached the stop in the workflow at which their entity's input is needed. Approvers should check the Approve queue promptly and deliver the appropriate response:
  • From the Pages Pending Approval list, please select each individual request in turn: it will open in the Page Review window below. Read through the Page and confirm that the application presented is appropriate in its terms and correctly presented, in particular that it conforms to your entity's governing rules and, if applicable, previously secured consensus for the application. (If, like the CAS Academic Council Chairperson, your entity needs to hold its monthly meeting and vote on each application before you sign off with its collective approval, by all means pause at this point. But if you spot concerns with any application that is waiting, please let the Curriculum Committee's Approver and the Associate Dean know outside CIM, or submitters or their partners as appropriate, so that they can work on resolving the concerns expeditiously and the application can be approved promptly when it receives the Council's vote).
  • If your role as approver includes making any edits within the Page, use the leftmost, blue "edit" button in the taskbar to open an editable window in which you can make appropriate changes and annotate them in the "Reviewer Comments" box at the bottom. Click the "save changes" button when you are done.
  • If you identify changes that should be made by a previous entity in the workflow, use the middle, red "rollback" button in the taskbar to select the entity to whom the request should be rolled back and in the "Comment/Reason" box to explain why. Click the "Rollback" button to send the request to the appropriate recipient. When the appropriate reconsiderations have been made and the proposal re-approved, CIM will advance the application back to you again. (Or else click "cancel" and abort your rollback.)
  • Once the application is in every way as it should be, from the perspective of the entity you represent as approver, use the rightmost, green "approve" button to send the application forward to its next stop on its workflow.

Complete, accurate records make it possible to reconstruct intentions and understandings in force at the time curricular changes (among other things) were made, so that any problems arising later can be unpicked and corrected: the archival function of the CIM forms and workflow system, preserving the records of curricular review, is of vital lasting value to the College.

By bundling, separate applications in CIM can be connected so that they will move through CIM's workflow for them as a package. This function enables, for example, a related set of course-changes to be sent through as a group, or the course-change of adding an interdisciplinary tag to be connected with the program-change of newly incorporating that course in that interdisciplinary major/minor. Instead of clicking "start workflow" as a final step for each separate item in your intended application-package, click only "save changes," until you get to the final item. Then when you click "start workflow" for the final item, lists of "saved" but not yet "started" courses and programs will appear - not only yours but all such not-yet-started applications presently in the system. Use the check-boxes within these two lists to select each individual item you intend to include in your package, doublecheck the set, and then click "start workflow."

• "CIP" is the acronym for "Classification of Instructional Programs," a taxonomic scheme originally developed by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). As a schema, the CIP is intended to "support ... the accurate tracking and reporting of fields of study and program completions activity." (Definition posted at CIP user site (ed.gov); see too the information-sheet posted by Loyola's Office of Institutional Effectiveness.)
• Browse CIP Codes at the NCES website, https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/browse.aspx?y=56. 
• CIP Codes are included as basic information in Loyola academic programs' Program Management matrices in CIM: please double-check to ensure academic programs your academic unit manages are coded appropriately.

Class Component is the term used in LOCUS to refer to different scheduling-units for different instructional modalities, under a single Course Number. At Loyola currently, many labs associated with lecture-courses are coded as separate, co-requisite courses: for example, our fictional Department of Forestry might offer TREE 121L, Arboriculture Lab, along with TREE 121 Arboriculture. But it would alternatively be possible to set up TREE 121 Arboriculture with both Lecture and Laboratory components, and require all registrants in a given LEC section also to register for one LAB section associated with it. Currently at Loyola most discussion-sections (component-code DIS) are set up this way. Adding a new class component to an existing course is considered a Course Change requiring approval by the Academic Council.

It is possible to schedule sections of two (or more) different courses to meet jointly in a given term. Schedulers wishing to set up such a joint meeting in the Class Schedule should work together across the academic units concerned and submit a Cross List or Combine Sections Request New to Registration & Records. As this request-name indicates, there is a technical distinction between "cross-listed" and "combined" sections:

• Cross-listed Sections offer jointly courses that are coded in LOCUS as equivalent. Both course-numbers appear in the Class Schedule. The course whose subject-area belongs to the academic unit whose faculty-member will serve as instructor of record for the jointly-offered sections is considered the parent for purposes of the semester's Class Schedule, and its section is set up to take student-enrollments. The other, child section is searchable but non-enrollment. The courses must be not only cross-coded as equivalent but also cross-credited appropriately in students’ majors and minors. But with these provisos, the fictional Department of Forestry and School of Public Policy may offer equivalent TREE 375/PPOL 375, Natural Resource Policy, in Fall semesters with a Professor of Forestry instructing and in Spring semesters with a Professor of Public Policy instructing and the "parent" and "child" status of the sections and their capacity to take student-enrollments trading off back and forth.
• Combined Sections meet jointly but allow separate enrollment in courses that are differentiated in the Catalog. Thus for example the fictional Department of Forestry might offer TREE 345/445 Fire Ecology and Restoration simultaneously to upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduate students, both groups enrolling in the section appropriate to their own Student Group, pursuing the learning outcomes appropriate to their level, and ultimately receiving the correct credit.

Course Numbers identify specific courses in LOCUS and the University Catalog, e.g., TREE 121, course-title Arboriculture, in the fictional Department of Forestry. When a form asks for a Course Number separately from the Subject Area Code, the two elements are distinguished. LOCUS uses alphabetical Subject Area Codes, typically 4 letters but occasionally 3 letters. The numerical Course Numbers typically use 3 digits, which may be extended by a fourth, alphabetical character (e.g., TREE 121L, Arboriculture Lab).

The term cross-listing is used for several related ideas that may be useful to distinguish by their operation in LOCUS:

• If courses are coded as equivalent, students who have completed a class under one Course Number will be blocked from registering for the equivalent course under the other Course Number, because LOCUS will read the enrollment-request as an unauthorized repeat of the class. Equivalency of courses is sometimes referred to as cross-listing.
• If one of a pair (or more) of equivalent courses is specifically required by a given major or minor, or included in a requirement-option list, students in that major or minor who take the equivalent course under the other Course Number will receive credit for it as if they had taken the listed course. But if a course would be picked up by a major or minor as an elective, that is, by wildcard programming only, any equivalent courses must be explicitly coded into the Academic Requirements Report as alternatives to the wildcard in the Electives list, in order to ensure that the equivalencies are correctly cross-credited. Cross-crediting commonly motivates cross-listing and equivalency of courses in different Subject Areas.
• When equivalent courses are scheduled jointly so that both Course Numbers appear in the Class Schedule, their joint appearance in the Class Schedule is referred to as cross-listing: this technical sense is the one preferred by Registration & Records. (Some people refer to non-equivalent classes being offered in a Combined Section as cross-listed, but this usage is less happy.)
• LOCUS preserves records of equivalent shell-courses in Subject Area Codes of Interdisciplinary Programs, for scheduling as cross-listed sections, but since tagging began to be used to identify courses included in interdisciplinary majors and minors, most of these courses have ceased to serve a practical purpose: they may be inactivated. (The historical record of the inactivated course is preserved in LOCUS, so that past students' academic records continue to be reported fully.)

It is advantageous to cross-list courses in departmental Subject Area Codes when members of the faculty of either department can be expected to teach substantially the same class to students pursuing major(s) or minor(s) in either academic field (thus for example, our fictional Department of Forestry cross-lists TREE 134, Peaches, with FZZZ 134, Peaches, in the Department of Things with Fuzz). The section of the course in the Subject Area of the home-department of the faculty member teaching the course is used as the enrollment section and for purposes of that semester's Class Schedule that course is considered the parent. Provided the equivalency of the cross-listed courses is correctly cross-credited in the applicable major(s)/minor(s), all students will receive the appropriate credit, whether or not the other cross-listed/equivalent course also appears in the Class Schedule in a Cross-listed Section. (It is perfectly possible to include non-departmental courses in departmental majors and minors without equivalency or cross-listing: the Department of Forestry requires its majors to take FZZZ 201, Bees, from the Department of Things with Fuzz, but never teaches an equivalent course).

• Submitters bear the responsibility to ensure their home-units have formalized all approvals of their proposals, in conformity with their internal rules and processes, before submitting any applications for consideration by the College's Academic Council.
• Submitters likewise are best advised to confirm all second units have formalized approvals of their proposals in conformity of their internal rules processes, before before submitting any applications for consideration by the College's Academic Council.
• Chairpersons, Interdisciplinary Program Directors, and others designated as approvers in the roles of CIM's workflows may sign off on behalf of their units only on the authority of the unit's consensus, formally secured in conformity with the unit's internal rules and processes. When they receive notifications from the CIM system, they are requested to review the application as soon as practicable, ensure it conforms with the academic design to which their unit has agreed, and promptly either roll it back for specified changes or approve it in CIM. Pre-clearance by submitters with home and second units avoids internal-process delays.
• Submitters bear the responsibility to ensure all partnering second-units are included correctly in their applications so that CIM can include them correctly in its workflow. Additions and corrections can be made. but they will delay the application's progress.
• No application-package shall be vetted by the Curriculum Committee or reviewed or voted on by the Academic Council as a whole, unless it has arrived at the CAS Curriculum Sub-Committee stop of its workflow with all pertinent approvals duly noted no later than the submission-deadline for the month. The interval between the submission-deadline and the Council's meeting permits the Curriculum Committee time to conduct a thoughtful review and follow up with submitters and home or second units to resolve concerns, errors, or inconsistencies in the documents. If the Curriculum Committee has rolled back an application-package and is confident that approved corrections will advance to the CAS Curriculum Sub-Committee workflow-stop shortly, the Curriculum Committee may elect to include in its Report to the Council for the month the proposals currently under revision. Otherwise the application's review by the Council shall be delayed until the workflow has returned the application-package to the CAS Curriculum Sub-Committee workflow-stop again.
• No applications within an application-package shall be voted on by the Academic Council as a whole or shall receive the Council's approval if voted on by mistake or in anticipation of corrections the Curriculum Committee had understood to be about to be made, unless it has arrived at the CAS Curriculum Committee or CAS Curriculum Chair stop of its workflow with all pertinent approvals duly noted no later than the day of the monthly meeting.
  • It shall be the responsibility of the Curriculum Committee, as its Chairperson shall delegate, to double-check the application-package for outstanding approvals on the day of the monthly meeting, and to withhold the Committee's recommendation from any applications still lacking their full sets of approvals.
  • The Council may determine that applications lacking approval of certain co-signatories can be voted on with the deletion of the non-approved partnership if it is secondary rather than integral to the application (e.g., a New Course proposed for cross-listing may go forward without an unapproved cross-listing, but a New interdisciplinary Major/Minor may not go forward without the approval of all its participating academic units). If such a determination is made, the submitters may accept such a deletion as a friendly amendment and, if the Council votes to approve the amended application, the submitters must undertake to amend all pertinent documents during the cleanup period.
• Curricular changes that will necessitate new or changed programming in a course or in a major, minor, or other academic program must be approved by the Academic Council no later than the February meeting of one academic year, in order to have any possibility of being on-track for effectiveness the following Fall term.
  • Any change for the following year's Academic Catalog must be finalized no later than 31 March within the current academic year, all approvals having been recorded in its workflow and all processing completed. Any changes not thus finalized will be re-targeted to a later academic year.
  • Please recognize that this timetable limits the "effective date" that can be requested for any proposed curricular change.
  • Changes in majors and minors normally are made only for effectiveness in a future Fall term, for the sake of clarity and consistency in all communications with students about their major(s)/minor(s).

• Most members of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences hold appointments in an academic department; a few hold joint appointments between different departments. The term thus refers to an organizational structure of the College by its academic focus. Academic departments typically administer one or more majors/minors within their scope, and serve as home-unit to courses in one or more subject-area code.
• Some members of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences hold appointments in an interdisciplinary program, a different organizational structure within or across Schools of Loyola University Chicago that may involve faculty of two or more academic departments as well as or instead of program-dedicated faculty. Interdisciplinary programs typically administer one or more interdisciplinary majors/minors or other academic programs. Some serve as home-unit to courses in their own subject-area code.

• Majors, minors, and other academic programs operate in LOCUS (and can be tracked by Academic Requirements Reports) in terms of specifically required courses, requirement-options, and [major/minor] electives.
  • Specifically required courses are programmed explicitly: for example, every student completing a major in the fictional Department of Forestry must successfully complete TREE 121, Arboriculture.
  • The courses in requirement-option lists also are programmed explicitly: for example, the Ethics requirement of the fictional major in Forestry might be satisfied by any two of TREE 355 Environmental Justice, TREE 356 Sustainable Development, TREE 357 Ethnobotany, TREE 358 Ecofeminism, and TREE 359 Natural Resources Conflict Resolution.
  • By contrast, students' choice of electives in a major or minor (or other academic program) is constrained only by subject-area code and possibly level, e.g., "any TREE course" or "any 300-level TREE course," offered by the fictional Department of Forestry. Major/minor electives of this type are programmed LOCUS by wildcards, TREE ### or TREE 3## respectively.
• Courses an individual student completes outside the student's declared major(s)/minor(s) earn credit as hours toward graduation as general electives.
• A course's serving as a major/minor elective or a general elective is a function not of the course itself, but of individual students' choices of courses in light of programming in LOCUS. TREE 355 Environmental Justice equally could be part of how one Forestry major satisfies the Ethics requirement, a major/minor elective for another Forestry major who already previously took TREE 357 and TREE 358, and a general elective for a student majoring in Government.
• Majors and minors that use extradepartmental courses, including interdisciplinary majors/minors and interdepartmental majors/minors, typically do not use true, wildcard-programmed major/minor electives but must rely on requirement-option lists. (Both specifically required courses and requirement-option courses of an interdisciplinary major/minor should be marked with the tag of that major/minor, but tags function only in Class Search: LOCUS and students' ARRs cannot read tags.)
• New courses in a given subject-area code will automatically be picked up by pre-existing major/minor elective wildcard rules they satisfy: apart from its role in the Forestry major's Ethics requirement, TREE 358 Ecofeminism when it was a new course instantly was picked up as an elective in the Forestry minor by the pre-existing wildcard rule TREE 3##, but the new course needed to be explicitly programmed in a list of requirement-options for the interdisciplinary minor of the Gender Studies Program (such a list could seem elective-like if it is long and various, but unless a subject-area code holds it together for wildcard coding its options must be specified). Please double-check the programming structures of all majors and minors in which a new course should be included, when the course is created, and submit Change of Major/Minor applications accordingly for every major and for every minor in which pre-existing elective wildcard rules do not correctly cover all intended uses of the new course.

When two (or more) sections of different courses are scheduled to meet jointly in a given term as a Combined Section, one or more may be open to enrollment by students while the other(s) may be non-enrollment sections. If the courses of the Combined Section serve different Student Groups (for example, graduate and undergraduate sections working on the same material at different levels, with differentiated bases of assessment), allowing students to register in the course appropriate to their own Student Group ensures they receive the correct credit. A Combined Section of equivalent courses, however (the configuration strictly meeting the definition of cross-listing), makes the class visible to both constituencies, and provided the courses are cross-credited appropriately in students’ majors and minors, all students receive appropriate credit even if only the section in the Subject Area of the instructor’s home department serves as the enrollment section.

• If courses are coded as equivalent, students who have completed a class under one Course Number will be blocked from registering for the equivalent course under the other Course Number, because LOCUS will read the enrollment-request as an unauthorized repeat of the class.
• If one of a pair (or more) of equivalent courses is specifically required by a given major or minor, or included in a requirement-option list, students in that major or minor who take the equivalent course under the other Course Number will receive credit for it as if they had taken the listed course. But if a course would be picked up by a major or minor as an elective, that is, by wildcard programming only, any equivalent courses must be explicitly coded into the Academic Requirements Report as alternatives to the wildcard in the Electives list, in order to ensure that the equivalencies are correctly cross-credited.

• Although most majors and minors in the College of Arts and Sciences are administered either by an academic department or by an interdisciplinary program, some are administered jointly by two academic units, without involving a separate administrative structure (e.g., the minor in Biostatistics, the major in Sociology and Anthropology).
• For the most part, formal procedures for curricular review of interdepartmental majors/minors follow the patterns of departmental majors/minors, except that both academic units sign off jointly to give authorization. Curricular requests in which interdepartmental majors/minors are involved should make sure to include both home-units as stakeholders.
• Courses serving interdepartmental majors/minors are not typically identified in LOCUS by tags.

• Interdisciplinary majors/minors are administered by interdisciplinary programs formally so constituted as administrative units in the College of Arts and Sciences. (The administrative distinction is the crucial one: departmental majors/minors, as well as interdepartmental majors/minors and interdisciplinary majors/minors, may include courses in subject-areas outside the home unit/s.)
• The authority in curricular matters of Directors of interdisciplinary programs is presumed to arise from the consent of the participating faculty, just as the authority of departmental Chairpersons for departmental and interdepartmental majors/minors is presumed to arise from departmental consent; nonetheless, while Directors authorize applications to add individual courses to interdisciplinary majors/minors, participating departments are expected to sign off as stakeholders on applications for structural changes to interdisciplinary majors/minors.
• Courses serving interdisciplinary majors/minors normally are identified in LOCUS by tags. Please note, however, that the programming of a major or minor to include a course (handled through CIM's Program Management portal) is distinct from the programming of a course with a tag (handled through CIM's Course Inventory Management portal; the two applications may be bundled), although both items of programming should be done to match. The only function of a tag is to match its parameter in LOCUS's Class Search.

Interdisciplinary Programs are formally constituted as administrative units, by authority of the Provost and the President, in or across Schools within Loyola University Chicago. Two or more academic departments typically participate in the administration of an interdisciplinary program; interdisciplinary programs typically administer one or more interdisciplinary majors/minors.

LOCUS is the student information system used by Loyola University Chicago. Functions important for curricular purposes include the Course Catalog, Class Scheduling, and academic records including the programming of students’ Academic Requirement Reports.

• A parent course, for purposes of the semester's Class Schedule, is the member of a pair (or more) of equivalent courses as coded in LOCUS, of which sections are scheduled to meet jointly in a combined, cross-listed section, which belongs to the academic unit whose faculty-member will serve as instructor of record; it is set up as the enrollment section. The other, child section, appears in the Class Schedule and is searchable but non-enrollment. The courses must be not only cross-coded as equivalent but also cross-credited appropriately in students’ majors and minors in order for their Academic Requirements Reports to assign credit correctly.
• Some older records suggest that a distinction was once made between (somehow) logically-prior parent courses and notionally subsidiary child courses at the time of their creation, but this distinction no longer serves a useful function. Our fictional Department of Forestry and School of Public Policy offer equivalent TREE 375/PPOL 375, Natural Resource Policy, in Fall semesters with a Professor of Forestry instructing and in Spring semesters with a Professor of Public Policy instructing and the "parent" and "child" status of the sections and their capacity to take student-enrollments trading off back and forth.

LOCUS uses Plan Codes to identify specific majors and minors. Plan Codes typically consist of 4 alphabetical characters, which may or may not correspond with a Subject Area Code administered by the same academic unit as the major/minor in question, plus a suffix indicating the degree: thus for example the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry administers the BIOC-BS, BIOC-BA, CHEM-BS, CHEM-BA, CHEM-MINR, BIOC-BS/MS, CHEM-BS/MS, CHEM-MS, and CHEM-PHD, B.S. in Biochemistry, B.A. in Biochemistry, B.S. in Chemistry, B.A. in Chemistry, Minor in Chemistry, Combined Biochemistry B.S./MS, Combined Chemistry B.S./M.S., M.S. in Chemistry, and Ph.D. in Chemistry respectively. Majors and minors are indexed in CIM's Program Management portal by their Plan Codes, so its lookup search is a convenient way to find out a specific Plan Code.

The term reviewer applies to any person who consults applications in CIM's workflows during the process of curricular review:

• Members of the Academic Council's Curriculum Committee undertake the important responsibility of reviewing all applications thoroughly, working with the submitters so as to resolve any potential difficulties they identify, and formulating recommendations for the Council as a whole. (The Curriculum Committee's "stop" in CIM's workflows is called the "CAS Curriculum Sub-Committee"; a specific member of the Curriculum Committee is designated each year to sign off in CIM workflows as the Curriculum Committee's approver. This person receives notices from CIM to check the Approve queue, but all members can use the "quick searches" box on the Course Inventory Management platform or Program Management platform to search for "edited" courses/programs, and see in the Workflow column at what stop in their individual workflow each application presently rests.)
• All members of the College's Academic Council are expected to familiarize themselves with all applications submitted for the Council's review in any given month, in advance of the monthly meeting, so as to advise the submitters and represent the interests of the academic unit they each represent on the Council, in the Council's discussion and voting. They too are invited to work with submitters while applications are under review so as to resolve any potential difficulties they identify. (The Academic Council's "stop" in CIM's workflows is called the "CAS Curriculum Committee" or "CAS Curriculum Chair"; the Chairperson of the Council is designated to sign off in CIM workflows as the Council's approver, consequent on the Council's deliberations and vote at the monthly meeting. The Chairperson receives notices from CIM to check the Approve queue. All Council members can use the "quick searches" box on the Course Inventory Management platform or Program Management platform to search for "edited" courses/programs, and see in the Workflow column at what stop in their individual workflow each application presently rests.)
• Depending on the nature of the application-package and its needs, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and other members of the Dean's Office may also review elements of applications and work with submitters so as to resolve potential difficulties.
• Stakeholders in the application-package outside the package's home-unit, such as second-units partnering with the home unit in individual applications within the package, may also perform the function of reviewers. (Stakeholders receive notices from CIM to check the Approve queue when their sign-off is needed to advance an application or, if appropriate, roll it back for corrections or modifications. Stakeholder approvers' authority rests on the consensus of the academic unit they represent, duly secured by the unit's internal processes. Stakeholders curious about a particular application can search for it in the Course Inventory Management platform or Program Management platform, and see in the Workflow column at what stop it presently rests.)
• Members of the submitters' home unit, such as the Chairperson/Program Director, are commonly included in references to the submitters, but they too may also perform the function of reviewers. (Chairpersons/Program Directors receive notices from CIM to check the Approve queue when their sign-off is needed to advance an application or, if appropriate, roll it back for corrections or modifications. Chairpersons'/Program Directors' authority rests on the consensus of the academic unit they represent, duly secured by the unit's internal processes. Chairpersons/Program Directors curious about a particular application can search for it in the Course Inventory Management platform or Program Management platform, and see in the Workflow column at what stop it presently rests.)

Role is CourseLeaf's term, the company that designed CIM as a general system and customizes it for specific universities' curricular-review practices, for the position of each individual needed to sign off for the successive "stops" in the CIM workflows. Because departmental chairpersons and interdisciplinary program directors, for example, change from time to time on individual schedules, having a place for a role rather than a specific individual makes the system able to continue when the individuals change. And because CourseLeaf designs and customizes systems to accommodate institutional variation across different universities who use their CIM systems, some roles don't quite match Loyola's terminology: the College's Academic Council corresponds to the CIM role "CAS Curriculum Committee," for example, and the Council's Curriculum Committee corresponds to the CIM role "CAS Curriculum Sub-Committee." But structurally it works out.

Every student pursuing a given major/minor must successfully complete every one of its specifically required courses in order to complete the major/minor successfully. Majors and minors vary tremendously how much they make use of specifically required courses.

• Any academic unit concerned in a proposed curricular change is a stakeholder. The term is used especially of second unit(s) signing on to a change proposed by the major/minor’s or course’s home unit.
• Submitters should not only secure their home unit's approval of their proposals, in conformity with the academic unit's internal rules and processes, before submitting any applications for consideration by the College's Academic Council, but also should consult transparently all stakeholders with any potential interest in the proposal. Submitters bear the responsibility to ensure all partnering second-units are included correctly in their applications so that CIM can include them correctly in its workflows.
• Stakeholders receive notices from CIM to check the Approve queue when their sign-off is needed to advance an application or, if appropriate, roll it back for corrections or modifications. Stakeholder approvers' authority rests on the consensus of the academic unit they represent, duly secured by the unit's internal processes.
• Stakeholders curious about a particular application can search for it in the Course Inventory Management platform or Program Management platform, and see in the Workflow column at what stop it presently rests.

Student groups are used by LOCUS to program enrollment-restrictions according to characteristics of students prospectively enrolling in a given class: for example, students who have declared a certain major/minor, students of a certain academic standing, or students enrolled on a specific overseas campus. Restrictions according to Student Group may be programmed for a course permanently, in the Course Catalogue (in which case they are subject to approval through the College’s curricular-review process), or in the Class Schedule for a specific class-section in a specific semester.

Subject Area Codes identify the academic field in which a course is coded. Subject Area Codes typically use 4 letters but occasionally 3. "Courses" tabs in the Academic Catalog list courses in each academic unit by subject area code, course number, and title. So does the Course Inventory Management portal in CIM. The Browse Course Catalog index in LOCUS also is a convenient place to verify Subject Area Codes for currently effective courses.

• The verb submit is shorthand for formally initiating a curricular request in its appropriate CIM portal. Red-rimmed input boxes in CIM forms are for information needed by the system before the application can advance: when preparing an application, please ensure all pertinent information is complete, correct, and supported by the consensus of the academic unit(s) on which it will depend for realization. Please ensure all partnering second-units are included correctly so that CIM can include them correctly in its workflow. Finally, press the green START WORKFLOW button at the bottom of the form: this step submits the application.
• The noun submitter refers, according to context, either to the individual who has taken the lead in designing the curricular change being requested and securing consensus supporting it in the proposal's home and partner-unit(s) - normally that person fills out the application forms in CIM needed for review and approval of the proposal - or to the academic home unit that will administer the course(s) and/or academic program(s) the application-package concerns.

Various supporting documents are requested by CIM forms to be uploaded so as to provide information needed or helpful to evaluate the curricular requests being made: a preliminary draft syllabus helps demonstrate how instructors expect to teach a new course, for example, a message of approval shows the home-unit's commitment to service-learning pedagaogy is such as to meet criteria for the Engaged Learning Requirement, budgets and assessment plans lay needed groundwork for the operation of a new academic program. All new Program requests require cross-indexing, as provided for within the CIM form, to the approved Intent request on whose basis the Provost invites the submitters to proceed with the Program request. Please ensure all appropriate supporting documents have been uploaded with your request forms in CIM, before submitting the request.

• Tags mark courses in LOCUS’s course-catalogue, or class-sections in particular terms’ class schedules, as possessing specified “class attributes” such as Core or Engaged Learning credit. The tags of greatest pertinence in the College of Arts and Science’s curricular review, however, identify class-sections’ carrying credit toward interdisciplinary major(s)/minor(s). Tags appear in the Enrollment Information box of the Class Detail display.
• The Class Search function in LOCUS can read tags, so that they make it possible to search across different Subject Area Codes for class-sections bearing particular tags.
• Academic Requirements Reports cannot read tags: the inclusion of a course in an interdisciplinary major or minor is entirely separate within LOCUS from the marking of a course as so included (although certainly no course should be tagged with information that is not true).
• Interdisciplinary Programs may apply to tag departmental courses and include them in interdisciplinary major(s)/minor(s) on either a permanent or a temporary, semester-specific basis.
  • Permanently tagged courses should also be programmed permanently in students’ ARRs as specifically required courses, courses satisfying specified requirement-options, or (wildcard-programmed) electives. Permanently tagging a new or existing course and adding it to an interdisciplinary major/minor requires approval by the Academic Council. Paired requests to tag the course and to add it to each major/minor concerned should be made through the Course Inventory Management platform and the Program Management platform respectively; they may be bundled.
  • If a permanently tagged course is to be removed from an interdisciplinary major/minor, the application to remove the course from the major/minor and the application to remove the tag from the course, in the Program Management platform and the Course Inventory Management platform respectively, likewise may be bundled.
  • Section-specific, semester-specific Temporary Tag requests and requests to cross-list departmental courses on a temporary, semester-specific basis presently continue to be processed by the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, by hand. Please e-mail the Associate Dean for the current form and instructions.

The Temporary Tag/Cross-List Request is made on a semester-specific basis, for the purpose of crediting to specified major(s)/minor(s) a specific section of a course not ordinarily included. Please file Temptag/Tempcross requests separately from requests involving permanent course-coding or major/minor coding. Please see the Instructions.

• Temptag/Tempcross requests most commonly arise in the case of variable-topics courses, not all of whose potential topics would be suitable for the major(s)/minor(s) in question.
• Temptag/Tempcross requests may be used to fill in the processing-lag between approval of Permanent Tag or Permanent Cross-listing requests and their becoming effective.
• Temptag/Tempcross requests are processed through the DocFinity Platform in application-packages structurally similar to the permanent requests reviewed by the Academic Council, but see the Instructions. Unlike permanent tag or permanent cross-list requests, temptag/tempcross requests do not involve Course Inventory Forms, since no permanent change is to be made in the coding of the course itself. Since neither is any permanent change made in students' ARRs, classes temporarily included in students’ major(s)/minor(s) must be hand-credited by students’ CAS Advisors via Individual Directives.
• Temptag/Tempcross requests require co-signatory authority of all stakeholders, just like permanent tag or permanent cross-list requests.
• Temptag/Tempcross requests are reviewed by the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, not by the Academic Council. Although they can be turned around relatively quickly, please submit them with enough lead-time before registration for the term the class will be offered that Registration and Records can process the information to appear in the Class Schedule.
• Please advance Permanent Tag or Permanent Cross-list requests as soon as it is determined they are appropriate, so as to avoid the inefficiencies of the temporary process.