In May, Senate approved a new Cellular, Anatomical, and Physiological Sciences (CAPS) major for the Faculty of Science within the Cellular and Physiological Sciences Department.
This is the first step in the process of developing the major.
Until now CAPS courses were limited to the honours program, which consisted of only 25 to 30 students. The new major will allow space for a total of 120 students.
Final approval still needs to be granted by the Board of Governors at its meeting this summer. If they it decides to grant approval, the CAPS major will be available to second-year UBC students in the fall of 2024.
“[Until then,] this discussion is hypothetical,” said Edwin Moore, Cellular and Physiological Sciences department head.
The department has been running the honours program since the 1950s, and consideration for adding a major initially stemmed from department reviewers visiting UBC.
They suggested the program be expanded to produce a major, given the limited size of the honours program and persisting interest from a larger student body.
Moore said, “the demand for the program has always been far greater than we could provide with a small Honours cohort … that’s the main impetus behind developing the major program, and it should give undergraduate students more options to select from in terms of [what] they want to major [in].”
The department has since been working to create a CAPS major in addition to the existing honours program.
According to Moore, “there will [remain] academic requirements to get accepted into the honours.”
The current CAPS honours program requires students to take 132 credits, while the major program requires students to take 120.
Given the current timeline, if the Board grants final approval in summer, high school students graduating in 2023 will be the first UBC class to have CAPS as a major.
Current Honours students at UBC will not be affected by the addition of the CAPS major, nor will those entering the program in the 2023/24 academic year.
"As the new majors and revised honours [roll] out, students coming into second year [in 2024] will be enrolled in [the new] program.”