Four years ago, John Ambrose, now the associate dean in the division of undergraduate academics, took the helm of the task force charged with reevaluating the University’s decade-old General Education Requirements for undergraduates.
Thirty months later, the group of faculty members, administrators and students had developed a revamped plan, which includes reduced credit hour requirements and complete portability between majors. The provost approved the plan on Feb. 1.
“We were requiring more GER credits than our sister institutions and our peer institutions,” Ambrose said. “[The old GER] had been in place a little over 10 years. Once you’ve had something for that long, it’s time to look at changing it.”
The Force
The General Education Review Task Force, under a charge from the provost, began addressing issues of the current GER raised by students and faculty during its first meetings in October 2004, Jose Picart, vice provost for diversity and African-American affairs, said.
One concern Ambrose said the task force encountered was the difficulty and confusion of transferring GERs if students decided to switch their majors.
The Plan
The new General Education Plan addresses these worries by offering more universal, broader categories with the GEP, according to Ambrose.
“It makes broad categories, which cannot be subdivided,” he said. “It’s going to make things a lot more transparent for students.”
By reducing the number of hours required in mathematics/natural sciences and humanities/social sciences to 13 and 12 hours, respectively, the task force was able to create a program with fewer credit hours and incorporate new categories, according to Ambrose.
“We’ve added some new categories — global knowledge, diversity and interdisciplinary studies,” he said.
With interdisciplinary studies, Ambrose said, “students will have the opportunity to take a course where they get input from two different disciplines.”
Picart, who is overseeing the diversity course requirement, said the three-credit requirement can be achieved by taking a course that addressed diversity in the United States in one of several disciplines.
“Essentially, with the diversity course, the student will have a list of courses they can choose from that will fulfill that requirement and a Humanity and Social Sciences requirement,” he said.
According to Picart, many faculty members recommended global knowledge and diversity course requirements to “fit how we do business here at N.C. State.”
“And very early on, a number of faculty proposed that there be a diversity and global knowledge requirement,” he said. “Motivation came from realizing that we had an opportunity to provide one more opportunity or experience.”
The two categories under the new GEP will offer course options from several colleges, because “all of our colleges are preparing students that might work in the global economy,” according to Picart.
And Ambrose said the reduced overall GEP requirements will offer several possibilities to students as well.
“These changes are very well planned and very advantageous to our students,” he said. “Students may actually be able to graduate faster … and students can have more room to experiment while they are here.”
According to Ambrose, these advantages may culminate in students attaining more minors or choosing to double major.
The Implementation
The new General Education Plan will go into effect for summer session II in 2009, for incoming freshman as of the fall of 2009, but ongoing discussion may lead the University to apply the changes unilaterally, Ambrose said.
“There’s been some discussion as to whether this could be retroactive,” he said. “But the concern is, ‘can our registriation and records system maintain both systems?'”
Ambrose said he is pleased with the outcome of the task force’s four years of work and thinks it will show in the benefits it will provide students.
“I don’t think our students are going to be short-changed,” he said. “It will be interesting to see what students think after they’ve gone through the program.”
