Credit
System Evaluated
Faculty and Administration Consider Revamp to Credit System
by Alyson Dame
As Oberlin students approach midterms, discussion brews
within the faculty as to whether Oberlin students are spread too thin.
Last week, department heads met with deans to discuss possible changes
in the College credit system and while no detailed plan has been proposed,
there are some who would like the credit system adjusted so that a
four course schedule would be a graduation-track load.
When Assistant Dean of Students Bob Geitz assumed his current position,
he began looking into how Oberlin course loads compared to those of
other schools. “This has been coming up in faculty meetings for
years. I started doing some research when I came into this office,”
he said.
Geitz found that the Oberlin schedule differed from peer institutions.
“If you look at other schools like Oberlin, whether it’s
a liberal arts college or elite universities, what you see is that
students build their schedule by taking four classes a semester,”
Geitz said. “I’m still trying to get people to understand
you don’t have to do it the way we’re doing it, because
no one else is doing it that way,” he added.
The idea is still in the discussion phase. “There’s no proposal
yet for what we ought to do, I would say it’s still in the education
phase,” Geitz said. The EPPC will discuss it in its next meeting.
“No formal proposal has come from EPPC, so it’s a little
hard to see what it’s going to look like,” Politics department
chair Ben Schiff said.
Meanwhile, Geitz is planning meetings to develop the concept. “I’m
hoping to organize enough discussions this semester that we have a
sense of where this might be going and how we might get there,”
he said.
Yolanda Cruz is the chair of the biology department, and she fears
that the new program will limit student’s flexibility. “In
general, we don’t like it because it’s going to make the
curriculum less flexible for students,” she said.
Geitz
does not advocate setting a maximum number of hours so that students
could only take four courses, but thinks a student taking four courses
should be on par for graduation. As is, a student can take four
three-credit classes, and be two credits short of the average semester
course load needed to graduate. “I’m not trying to cut
down on the flexibility of our system, I’m trying not to require
people to do more than that. The goal in this is to preserve the
richness of the curriculum, while giving Oberlin students the credit
they would be getting anywhere else,” he said.
David Walker, who chairs the English department, supports the idea.
“Philosophically, I’m very much in favor of the change.
I think most people in my department would be too,” Walker
said.
Walker, like many professors, senses that Oberlin students tend
to spread themselves too thin. “Taking four courses at a time
rather than five would mean that students would have the time and
the energy to concentrate fully on the classes they were taking,”
he said.
In theory, changing the credit system so that students would not
need to take as many classes per semester would not mean less challenging
semesters for students, rather it would mean ones less fragmented.
“It’s not that classes would become easier and students
will have less to do, but the classes will command more of the student’s
time,” Schiff said.
One hope for a changed course credit sytstem is that it will bring
smaller class sizes because students will be in fewer classes. On
the other hand, Cruz believes that as long as some courses are more
popular than others, there will always be the problem of crowded
classrooms. “The assumption in that model is all fields are
equally attractive to students, and it’s a very naïve
assumption. It’s not going to shake down into a smaller class
ratio, because there will always be high demand classes,” Cruz
said.
Cruz believes that there are other, more sensible solutions for
overworked students. “It’s a matter of advising. If we
had perfect advising, you’d never have a student who was doing
weird things and overloading themselves,” she said. Another
suggestion the biology professor had is one many students may find
agreeable. “Why don’t we just reduce the number of credits
needed for graduation?” Cruz asked.
If credit hours were increased, it would mean different things for
different departments. It was for that reason that Geitz organized
the meeting of department heads, beginning a dialogue between departments.
“Departments either loved or hated the idea and there wasn’t
any cross talk between them,” Gietz said. The logistical problems
tend to be greater for the natural sciences.
“Not all our courses in the sciences are the same amount of
credits,” Cruz said.
Walker recognized the implications varied depended on the department.
“When the chairs met, it became clear there were some logistical
problems that wouldn’t affect the English department, but would
be difficult for other departments. I hope they can be worked out,”
he said.
Others emphasized that these obstacles could be overcome. “It’s
clear that different departments that teach different kinds of courses
are concerned that however this is worked out that the core curriculum
and the major will be affected. I view those as technical problems,
not problems with the basic concept,” Schiff said.
Questions on how physical education classes and ExCo credit would
change have also arisen. Members of the faculty and administration
have realized the need for student voices to be heard on this topic.
“If students had some way to contribute their views to this
discussion, I think that would help faculty,” Schiff said.
Beneath the discussion about course credit lies one about the educational
experience at Oberlin, Geitz hopes that question will be confronted
in the upcoming meetings. “I wish we had some way to have ongoing
discussions about what it is we want from our Oberlin education,”
he said.
Cruz thinks that a valuable part of an Oberlin education is the
flexibility, and is wary of changing because other schools have.
“If we just make our course loads like every other school we’re
just being copy cats,” she said.
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