UB’s general education requirements are about as old as its current class of seniors. The curriculum hasn’t been majorly altered since 1992, but Dean of Undergraduate Education Andrew Stott is working on a major program overhaul.
In a survey of more than 3,000 students, 68 percent said general education requirements were something to “get out of the way.”
The current general education program requires students to complete 39-48 credits and students need 120 credits to graduate. Stott said if students feel indifferent about one-third of their education, it’s a “waste.”
The proposal for a revamped program is just starting to be presented to the UB community – its first open forum was on Tuesday and its next is Friday afternoon.
The current system “has rather been allowed to wander in the dark with no real faculty oversight, and as a result, some of the original intention of the program from 20 years ago has been allowed to erode,” Stott said.
The existing curriculum includes writing skills, mathematical skills, a world civilizations sequence, a natural sciences sequence, an American pluralism class, social and behavioral sciences skills as well as language, humanities, arts and depth requirements. Students also need to complete library skills but not for credit.
“We are the most comprehensive public university in the state of New York, so we have enormous academic and educational riches here on campus,” Stott said. “We have all these incredible things and they’re right here. It’s just that, in relation to general education specifically, we feel we can make more of the package that we currently have.”
Between Feb. 1, 2012 and June 1, 2013, 16 percent of the 8,184 graduated students completed the entire general education requirement through UB. Students can receive exemptions from some of the general education curriculum through things like advanced placement exams and transfer credits.
Stott said 72 percent of students are exempt from some or all foreign language study – like students with engineering majors – and 73 percent of students receive a “waiver, exemption or exception” from UB’s six-credit writing composition program.
If a transfer student enters UB with more than 24 credits of college classes, they are able to be exempt from the world civilizations sequence, American pluralism and art. In some cases, students can fulfill a humanities requirement if they take the ENG 101 or 201 class under writing skills, Stott said.
An assessment of students who completed the writing skills portion of the curriculum found 65.8 percent of students felt their achievements from the class were “excellent or very good” and 26.9 percent felt their performance was “good,” according to the proposal.
A team of graders led by UB’s director of composition sampled the students’ papers against a rubric and found 40 percent did not reach the standards and 24 percent were “borderline.”
Stott said UB participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement, which sets standards for the amount of student participation on campuses. It benchmarked the university against 62 other schools in the American Association of Universities and found UB lacked in the amount of opportunities students were given for “high-impact education practices,” Stott said.
High-impact education practices include first-year seminars, internships, study abroad, research projects and capstones.
The proposal for the new general education program will undergo multiple revisions and take in suggestions, like through the open forum. It will then be presented to the Faculty Senate. Stott believes if the Faculty Senate agrees with the proposal by December, the earliest the new curriculum could be implemented is the fall of 2016.
To integrate more student involvement into the proposal, Stott met with Student Association President James Ingram and Minahil Khan, SA student affairs director and UB Council representative, to ask how to receive more student feedback.
The group decided to create a task force that involves about 13 students from diverse majors to formulate an opinion on the proposal, which aims to promote a liberal arts education while incorporating major-related classes.
The committee will meet on Sept. 30 to discuss final changes and give Stott a report with an approval, approval with recommendations or denial of the proposal before it goes to the Faculty Senate.
Khan believes the response from the committee has been “overwhelmingly positive” and she did not hear any preference for the current program over the proposed one.
“There’s not an even distribution of what students are required to take,” she said.
She said it’s important to create a “more comprehensive general education requirement” so students feel like they’re not only fulfilling requirements, “but also gaining something out of it.”
Stott believes the value of a liberal arts education is not being communicated through the current general education program. Although he does not mean to “denigrate” the present system, but thinks students deserve a change if they’re not getting the most out of the program possible.
“There’s no reason why we can’t build a world-class general education program out of all the raw materials that we have here,” he said. “We don’t need anything new, we just need to structure it differently.”
On Sept. 19, an open forum will take place at the Center For the Arts’ screening room from 1-3 p.m. The session will give the UB community an opportunity to discuss the old and new general education requirements. A previous open forum took place on Sept. 16 on South Campus.
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