|
|
Peer Review, Winter 2000
"Why Do I Have to Take this Course?" or
Credit Hours, Transfer, and Curricular Coherence
Robert Shoenberg, Senior Fellow, AAC&U |
It was the fashion among novelists in the nineteenth century
to give their books two titles: one catchy and allusive to
pique interest, the other more prosaic and explanatory. I've
chosen this style of titling because what I want this article
to be about-helping students make sense of their college education-and
the place to which my chain of reasoning keeps pulling me-bureaucratic
arrangements for determining degree completion-seem miles
apart. Thus, I need two titles.
I have been working for the past two years with state higher
education systems in Georgia and Utah, which are struggling
to find cogent and persuasive answers to students' perennial
question about general education requirements: "Why do I have
to take this course?" But they know they cannot answer the
question for students until they can answer it for themselves,
until they can agree on a cogent definition of their own curricular
intentions. And this is no mean feat, given the structural
and bureaucratic realities at hand. Not only must the colleges
and universities involved answer to the fiscal and political
concerns of state legislatures, respect faculty autonomy,
cope with limited tools for assessment, and make sense of
a crazy-quilt of student attendance patterns, but they must
also arrive at inter-institutional agreements about the purposes
of their requirements.
For state systems, the phenomenon of student mobility creates
a particularly complicated set of problems. All concerned
want, insofar as possible, to make movement within these systems
easy and to allow it to be accomplished without loss of credit.
The formal mechanisms for creating this "seamlessness" are
sets of common core courses and agreements about transfer
of credit. But in their zeal to effect ease of transfer, the
designers of these agreements often fail to take into account
either the variety of ends to which core courses might be
taught or the coherence of the general education program or
major to which those courses apply. Thus, they tacitly encourage
students to mix and match unrelated courses, encouraging them
to see these requirements as so many bureaucratic hurdles
to be jumped, not as parts of a purposeful and coherent curriculum.
The credit chase
Why is it so difficult to define, with intellectual clarity,
the meaning of an undergraduate education and the interconnections
of its parts? Why do we have such trouble answering students
when they pose the entirely legitimate question, "Why do I
have to take this course?"
Our problem can be traced, I believe, to what may seem a
rather distant source: the creation of the credit hour as
the standard unit of academic currency. Created early in the
20th century, the credit hour was designed to bring integrity
to a higher education system then rife with diploma mills.
The requirement that students complete a specified number
of credit hours worth of courses would assure anyone concerned
that holders of a degree had done genuine intellectual work
to earn it. Over the years, all kinds of voluntary accrediting
associations and administrative structures, strengthened by
state and federal legislation, have been created to certify
that, among other things, colleges and universities meet these
basic requirements for the awarding of a bachelor's, associate's,
or other degree.
As long as only a small percentage of an age cohort went
on to college and stayed at the same institution for four
years, the credit hour continued to serve only its original
purpose. However, following World War II, as the number and
variety of institutions increased and students became more
mobile, we discovered a new use for credits. They now began
to serve as a highly effective medium of exchange among institutions.
Students could accumulate them like so many dollars in their
bank accounts, and they could transfer them from one institution
to another. To be sure, this currency came in many different
types and denominations: semester, quarter, and course credits;
upper division and lower division; general education and the
major.... But we have been clever and increasingly well-organized
in managing the rates of exchange, so that by now we can pretty
well exchange credits at College A for those at College B
as effectively as we exchange pounds for dollars.
However, the convenience of the credit hour as common currency
has driven out the better but far less fungible currency of
intellectual purpose and curricular coherence. How easy it
is to define a baccalaureate degree as 120 credit hours (the
modal requirement) divided in specified ways, also stated
in terms of credit hours; and how easy to plug each course
into a formula linking class hours (or laboratory hours, or
hours in an internship or practicum) to units of credit. But
what do those hours mean in terms of the educational intentions
of the courses and the connections among them? Do they cohere
in the minds of individual professors and students? When added
together, do they comprise a meaningful whole?
The demand for efficiency
As student transfer among colleges and universities has increased
to the point where the majority of students receive bachelor's
degrees from an institution other than the one at which they
began study, demands have grown ever more vocal for efficiency
in the transfer of credits. Neither students nor state legislatures
want to pay twice for the same course. And many schools, anxious
to increase their enrollments, also seek to oblige students
as fully as possible.
The result has been transfer agreements between institutions
and across state systems that spell out in some detail what
kinds of courses will transfer in satisfaction of which requirements.
Sometimes a general education transfer package is specified
by legislation, as in Florida and Ohio, or by direction of
the state higher education coordinating system, as in Texas
and New York. In many other states, including the two in our
project, the higher education authority has brokered transfer
agreements by assembling groups of faculty to reach, under
some pressure, a system-wide articulation agreement.
However, none of these transfer agreements addresses in
any meaningful way the purposes of the general education curriculum,
much less the purposes of a baccalaureate degree. Uniformly
they assume a general education program consisting of a loose
distribution requirement plus competence in writing, mathematics,
and, increasingly, computer use. They give some definition
of the content of courses that meet the requirements, but
they offer few details as to the goals to be reached through
study of that content. As far as these transfer agreements
are concerned, all social science or science or humanities
courses are created equal. Never mind that the introductory
Political Science course at one institution addresses a different
set of purposes than the introductory course at another-they
are identical in the eyes of the transfer agreement. Never
mind that some schools offer a rigorous and integrated general
education program while others do not. Any collection of courses
from whatever source, no matter how lacking in coherence,
must be accepted for transfer if they are in the same subject
matter domains.
Florida, for example, has by legislative requirement developed
a common course numbering system across its public institutions,
specifying that all courses with the same number are entirely
interchangeable. A statewide committee determines the credit
hour equivalencies, but their oversight does not extend to
the purposes of each course, nor to measuring student achievement.
Any survey of, say, American History to 1865 is equivalent
to any other, no matter that one course drills students on
names and dates, while another raises complex questions about
the nature of historical inquiry.
The result of these kinds of credit-driven transfer regulations
is a lowest-common-denominator general education program,
based invariably on loose distribution requirements. And since
unique courses of study only serve to make transfer difficult
for students, schools have an incentive not to make their
own general education offerings too adventurous or challenging.
These practical restrictions are equally frustrating to
two- and four-year institutions. The community colleges, which
must prepare students planning to transfer to any of several
baccalaureate institutions, can ill afford to create general
education programs with distinct character. The four-year
colleges have somewhat more leeway in designing programs for
their native students, but they cannot hold transfer students
to those requirements. And when a majority of their graduates
turn out to have transferred their general education credits
from institutions with quite different goals, what can the
four-year institutions (even those with carefully-structured
general education programs) say about the integrity of their
degrees?
A need for systemic reform
The demands for transfer efficiency not only push general
education programs to the lowest common denominator but they
also tend to conflict with demands for educational accountability.
Since colleges and universities require a heavy investment
by students and taxpayers, they are expected to demonstrate
effectiveness in achieving the outcomes they promise. In other
words, each school must show that its students are meeting
its educational goals. But how does an institution measure
results against goals if it has no clear educational goals
and, indeed, is de facto discouraged from defining
them (at least for general education) too precisely, lest
they get in the way of efficient transfer?
The solution is to stop treating this as a problem for the
individual institution. The only way to reconcile the demands
for efficiency and accountability is to come to inter-institutional
or, better yet, system-wide agreement about the intended outcomes
of the general education program, and then to link those outcomes
closely to the transfer agreement. Accountable to a clear,
coherent, and common set of purposes, individual schools might
then invest in local curricular reforms without having to
worry about ease of transfer.
However, no states have as yet built these sorts of curricular
outcomes into their transfer guidelines, even where agreements
have been negotiated among academics rather than imposed by
legislators. Thus, the recent and ongoing work of the state
systems in Georgia and Utah promise to set an important precedent,
as well as serving to illustrate the challenges at hand.
During the 1998-99 academic year, faculty from these states'
public two- and four-year institutions began working with
AAC&U (supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's
Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education) to develop
new system-wide goals for general education, to gain broad
faculty and student understanding of them, and to come up
with ways to assess them.
Each state already had an existing set of general education
requirements, based on the standard English/Math/Distribution
model (though Georgia's newly-minted plan is rather more detailed
and includes a strong, statewide, faculty-dominated administrative
and policy structure). Neither set of requirements, however,
included a clear statement of goals for the program. They
simply set forth the subject matter areas to be covered and
the number of credit hours to be completed in each area, giving
no rationale for those requirements. Thus, a student might
ask, "Why do I have to take this course?" and a faculty member
would be at a loss to give an answer other than, "Because
it's required."
Thus the work going on in Georgia and Utah has to be characterized
as rationalization after the fact. The requirements already
having been established, faculty in these states have to decide
what they meant-or more properly want to mean-by them
in terms of students' ability to know, do, and understand.
Both state systems are driven to this task by firm mandates
to assess outcomes and the awareness that they cannot assess
outcomes without knowing what outcomes they want to achieve.
With such an arrangement in place, the faculty in Georgia
and Utah certainly have their work cut out for them. Consider,
for example, the ubiquitous requirement that students complete
a college-level mathematics course. Students whose major fields
of study require regular use of mathematical skills will seldom
question this requirement, but the many who expect never to
use anything more than simple arithmetic and geometry frequently
wonder why they must take such a course. Leaving aside the
vexed question of what constitutes "college-level math," one
might argue that "Educated people should be numerate as well
as literate." Well, why? And, more trenchantly, what mathematical
knowledge makes a person "numerate?" Is it a higher level
of mathematical skill than might normally be expected of high
school graduates? Is it a greater or different kind of facility
with arithmetic and basic algebra? Is it probability and statistics?
Mathematical modeling? And how do we increase the likelihood
that students will continue to use their new skills, so that
they don't forget what they learned as soon as the course
is over?
Adapting recommendations from the Quantitative Literacy
Subcommittee of the Mathematical Association of America, Utah
faculty agreed on a short list of skills that define a "quantitatively
literate college graduate." Rather than focusing on the prerequisites
for advanced math classes, they reasoned that all educated
people, math majors included, ought to be able to interpret
and manipulate the sorts of mathematical information that
support arguments in a range of fields. For example, graduates
should be able to:
- Interpret mathematical models such as formulas, graphs,
tables, and schematics, and draw inferences from them.
- Represent mathematical information symbolically, visually,
numerically, and verbally.
- Use arithmetic, algebraic, geometric and statistical
methods to solve problems.
- Estimate and check answers to mathematical problems
in order to determine reasonableness, identify alternatives,
and select optimal results.
- And recognize that all mathematical and statistical
methods have limitations.
Such a statement offers guidance in deciding which approach
to course content is best suited to a general education course,
as well as providing a strong connection between the outcomes
of the particular course and the larger purposes of the curriculum.
Further, it gives faculty members some basis upon which to
answer the question, "Why do I have to take this course?"
Enduring
challenges
Of course, the difficulty lies in encouraging all of the system's
faculty members, at all different kinds of institutions, to
teach to the purposes of the requirement. The lever most likely
to shift this heavy weight is assessment, which asks students
to demonstrate the requisite competence, and which promises
institutional embarrassment if faculty do not teach to the
agreed-upon goals. But the fulcrum on which the lever is to
be mounted is not yet in place; institutional commitments
to assessments of student competency are not yet firm. Nor,
for that matter, is the lever itself-the existing collection
of assessment strategies-strong enough to lift the weight
of custom.
Certainly, some institutions and a few states require students
at the mid-point of their baccalaureate programs to pass tests
demonstrating general skills and knowledge. Both the Educational
Testing Service and ACT have developed such examinations,
and they are used with some frequency either to test individual
students or to assess the institution's effectiveness in general
education. These tests are responsibly developed, but they
are, of necessity, geared to the lowest common denominator
in order to maximize the number of institutions that can use
them. In many situations in which they are used, the examinations
do not follow closely what is actually taught, how it is taught,
and testing methods with which students are familiar. Thus,
the value of test results as an indicator of the institution's
success in helping students meet the institutional goals-assuming
that it has clear goals aligned to the standardized examination-is
highly questionable.
Until outcomes assessment is developed to the point where
it seems credible to the majority of faculty, we appear to
be stuck with our credit hour addiction. Academia is, however,
being pushed to break the habit from a variety of quarters:
state legislatures and student and parent constituencies that
want to see concrete improvements; re-entry students who come
back to school to be certified for specific competencies;
professional accrediting associations that are beginning to
lean toward outcomes-based accreditation (a notable example
is the set of "ABET 2000" standards of the Accrediting Board
for Engineering and Technology.); and regional accreditors
who are slowly but surely pushing their members in the same
direction.
All these forces are at work in Georgia and Utah, leading
state systems there to clarify their goals in the manner of
the mathematics requirement cited above. As the experience
in those states has suggested, reaching this kind of clarity
is not as difficult as it looks. Cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary
groups of faculty, assembled at the state level, can fairly
readily arrive at a mutually agreeable statement of the general
intentions that implicitly underlie basic skills and distribution
requirements. But these groups are generally made up of faculty
members who accept the importance of such understandings.
Gaining their acceptance by the faculty back home is another
matter. A comparative handful of willing faculty can accomplish
the task in the abstract; turning those abstract understandings
into concrete actions with real consequences for faculty and
students is another matter.
Neither state group has yet gone through this process, and
it will require a massive effort both logistically and politically,
even in a state with as few higher education institutions
as Utah-nine public two- and four-year schools, plus one major
private university. For example, the process will have to
involve discipline-by-discipline discussions, acceptance of
the outcomes of those discussions by large numbers of faculty,
the certification of individual courses as meeting the guidelines,
and the effort to deal with the fallout when courses are not
certified.
Yet, to engage in this work is the only way we can hope to
move away from our present habit of simply counting credit
hours, with only a superficial look at what lies behind them.
Though the majority of college graduates no longer earn their
degrees at a single institution, they generally do complete
them within a single higher education system. If the integrity
of a single college or university's program once guaranteed
that an individual student would have a coherent educational
experience, it now must be the entire system that provides
this curricular integrity.
State systems, and other groupings of related institutions
among which students move, need to emulate the long and difficult
process of agreeing about intentions that has begun in Georgia
and Utah. Only then can we provide a useful answer to the
student who asks, "Why do I have to take this course?
|
 |
|
