Students and faculty adjust to more class time, additional coursework
By Jennifer Kiebach, News Editor
Upperclassmen may notice that they have a little more work to do outside of class this year due to a federally mandated “fourth credit hour” standard.
The new regulation, which officially went into effect at the beginning of the academic year, requires that each course unit have four hours of work each week. Faculty members have consequently had to prove this year that their courses contain an additional hour of work beyond the three hours for which most classes meet during the week.
Vice Provost Jack Ryan
“In general, people were already doing this in classes–there’s already a healthy amount of work going on outside of a given class,” said Vice Provost Jack Ryan, who served on the faculty committee that worked on developing the College’s plan for meeting the federal regulation.
He noted, for example, that some classes, such as language classes, already met five days a week previous to the creation of the fourth credit hour policy. Others, such as some film studies and science classes, already had scheduled film screenings or lab components.
“What we asked faculty members to do [in these kinds of classes] is identify or clarify what this additional work is and put it on the syllabus,” Ryan said.
Many classes, however, especially in the humanities and social sciences, did not have these “verifiable labs or external additions” prior to this year.
Professors of such classes had three options for how they could meet the fourth credit hour standard during each week of the course: They could schedule a fourth hour of instruction, require an hour-long lab, film screening or other activity or assign additional structured activities, such as research or attendance at certain events, that result in an assessed product.
For each course that a professor teaches, he or she must let students know at the beginning of the course how and when they are expected to complete the fourth hour of coursework each week.
“All of this has to appear in the course syllabus so students know what they’re undertaking when they take a class,” Ryan said.
Professors must also submit a form to a College committee responsible for evaluating whether or not the course sufficiently meets the fourth hour standard.
Although Ryan said he heard complaints from students last year about the additional workload that the new standard will require in some courses, he has not reached out to any student groups yet since the policy was officially implemented.
“I haven’t heard a lot of pushback from students this year, but I haven’t spoken to the Student Senate yet, for example,” he said.
Junior Mallory Sheer said she does not mind the additional class time in her Math 103 course, which now meets for 75 minutes three days a week instead of 50 minutes.
“I think that it’s actually beneficial because we get to learn more in class and I’ve liked it so far,” she said.
Others, like Sophomore Maura D’Amico, have not noticed much of a change in the amount of coursework they do.
“I didn’t really know about [the fourth credit hour] until recently,” she said. “Only one of my professors has mentioned it, so I’m not really sure how I feel about it.”
Regardless of how people feel about the new standard, Ryan said the College had no choice but to add the fourth credit hour.
“We have to meet the federal policy,” he said. “If we don’t meet the federal policy, then our federal funding would be cut, and then we would no longer be here.”
Funding from the federal government covers a variety of expenses at the College, including federal student aid, grants, including those from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and federal support for work-study programs.
Ryan noted that the College’s current criteria for meeting the requirement is the end result of months of deliberation over the fall and early spring semester during the 2011-2012 academic year and the College does not have any plans to change the policy in the future.
He noted, however, that the committee that evaluates whether or not courses meet one of the three options that the College has adopted could change its methods throughout the upcoming year.
“It’s sort of new territory, but we’ll work on it and we’ll refine it,” Ryan said. “The form [that professors fill out] won’t change, but how we evaluate the courses might.”
