Lumen Policy: Midcycle Updates

This is a summary of the Lumen/Guide: Policy on Midcycle Updates. Click here to view the official policy in its entirety in the UW-Madison Policy Library.

To support the Updating Principles by Tab policy, midcycle updates meant to refresh the course catalog (course changes effective spring or summer; “guide.wisc.edu/courses/”) and fix egregious errors that were missed for the June publication may be updated in the midcycle update. These errors, if not corrected, have a negative impact on students in the current term and will adversely impact students by delaying implementation of the change to the next Guide publication in June.

The Guide, to serve its purposes as a single source of truth, should be a stable and reliable resource that any advisor, student, prospective students, etc. can reference for an entire academic year, with minimal changes. Thus, changes for the midcycle updates should be small in nature Additionally, sticking to as few changes as possible over the academic year outside the Fall-effective June publication supports the original intentions of the single source project: to realistically manage the governance approval cycles within the limits imposed by the one-a-year publishing cycle of the Guide. The stability of Guide also helps advisors and students plan for efficient and predictable progress to the student’s degree and educational goals.

If program changes are required, the department owning a program impacted by changes to the course catalog (discontinuing courses, changes that involve the subject code and course number or the creation to new courses) is responsible for making updates to that program in Lumen Programs so that the inclusion of specific courses in Requirements, Admissions/How to Get in, Four-Year Plans matches the current course catalog (per term).

See Also:

• Procedures for Promotional Pages