Overall Rating Silver
Overall Score 63.74
Liaison Lacey Raak
Submission Date Feb. 18, 2023

STARS v2.2

California State University, Monterey Bay
AC-1: Academic Courses

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 8.40 / 14.00 Corin Slown
Associate Professor
Biology & Chemistry
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Part 1. Sustainability course offerings

Figures required to calculate the percentage of courses offered by the institution that are sustainability course offerings:
Undergraduate Graduate
Total number of courses offered by the institution 1,460 497
Number of sustainability-focused courses offered 37 7
Number of sustainability-inclusive courses offered 144 19

Percentage of courses that are sustainability course offerings:
10.58

Part 2. Sustainability course offerings by department

Total number of academic departments that offer courses:
24

Number of academic departments with sustainability course offerings:
15

Percentage of academic departments with sustainability course offerings:
62.50

Documentation

A copy of the institution’s inventory of its sustainability course offerings and descriptions:
Do the figures reported above cover one, two, or three academic years?:
One

A brief description of the methodology used to complete the course inventory :
The 2022 data was collected as part of an Undergraduate Research Project, supported by Corin Slown, Faculty member. All courses description and syllabi were reviewed, instructors were contacted for further information, and data was aggregated into Google Sheets. Courses were sorted by college and classified as "Sustainability-Focused," "Sustainability Inclusive," "Yet to Be," and "No." Sustainability-focused courses demonstrated repeated themes of sustainability and similar topics. Sustainability Inclusive courses included one unit on sustainability, projects related to sustainability, or projects in which students could choose topics related to sustainability. Yet-to-be courses were courses that do not currently have sustainability themes in the curriculum but could add sustainability material. Courses that were classified as no were designated as such because sustainability is not relevant to the course content or the course is rigorous enough that there is no space to add additional materials regarding sustainability.

For the 2021 report, we kept the 2019 data. There were complications with analyzing the 2020 data due to COVID.

The Sustainability TLA faculty group (with 5 members) and one student assistant reviewed the course offering from AY 2019 (as of Fall 2019). All courses were identified as 1 - a course that includes sustainability or 2 sustainability focused.

How were courses with multiple offerings or sections counted for the figures reported above?:
Each course was counted as a single course regardless of the number of offerings or sections

A brief description of how courses with multiple offerings or sections were counted:
Redundancies were removed. Any time a course was used for multiple courses, we removed to ensure the course was only included once.

Optional Fields 

Website URL where information about the sustainability course offerings is available:
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Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
41 sustainability-focused and 160 sustainability-inclusive undergraduate courses is correct. The curriculum review conducted in Fall 2022 only focused on undergraduate courses, which will likely account for some of the discrepancies. Additionally, duplicate courses were found in the corrections process and have since been removed. Some undergraduate courses may have been designated as "No" rather than the other categories in the data gathering process in an effort to be conservative rather than make a false assertion. Graduate course numbers were used from last year's STARS report, which may also contribute to discrepancies.

The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.