DeKALB | Provost Raymond Alden announced that the Strategic Planning Task Force has been completely assembled during Wednesday’s Faculty Senate meeting.

The SPTF is a group intended to put a plan of general direction for the university on paper. Alden said all 43 members of the task force have been named, and the first meeting will be next week.

Also at the meeting, faculty members debated concerns over the university switching to NIU Connect for student information services. Under NIU Connect, a student can lose his or her credits for a retaking class if they receive an “F” the second time around, said Daniel Kempton, an associate political science professor and chair of the Academic Affairs Committee.

Under the current system, if a student receives a “D” the first time they take a class and an “F” upon retaking the class, the “F” will count toward his or her GPA, but the student keeps the credit hours they received for the “D” grade.

The new system could be used as an additional deterrent to keep students from unnecessarily retaking classes, thus opening up more seats to students who do need to take the class, Kempton said.

Faculty members disagree on how to appropriately handle this situation. Michael Morris, an assistant foreign language and literatures professor, said the old system didn’t create any issues, and complications with technology shouldn’t change existing policy.

Paul Stoddard, president of Faculty Senate, said the problem could be worked around on paper. The lost credits can be manually entered into the system.

Some staff members compared the existing system to a “horse and buggy,” encouraging adopting the new system because of its vast technological improvement over the existing system.