Students and faculty debate one course, one credit

Students taking natural science and introductory language courses routinely spend twice the amount of time in class than students in other classes, prompting a possible resolution by the Student Government Association (SGA) to add a half credit to classes with extensive lab time.

Junior Senator Connor Hershkowitz ’12, Director of the Academic Affairs Committee Georgia Wright-Simmons ’12 and Academic Affairs Committee member Taylor Shepard ’12 have spearheaded the potential resolution.

“The basic plan is to explore the possibility of adding a half credit for extremely intensive courses — for example, first year Chinese or the lab sciences,” said SGA President Riley O’Rourke ’12. “We will consult the students, faculty and the administration before voting on a resolution in the Senate.”

Molecular biology and biochemistry major Barbara Wilkinson ’12 believes the resolution has long been warranted for natural science majors who, she says, spend significantly more time per class than other majors.

“I have a lot of friends both in the natural sciences and out, and it’s pretty clear who is still working at 1 a.m. consistently four or five days a week,” she said. “A clear disparity certainly exists that is not reflected in the course credits.”

According to Professor of Geology Peter Ryan, 16 out of 18 classes offered in the Geology department have weekly three-hour lab classes in addition to three hours of lecture per week.

“I expect that a typical Middlebury class should take 10 hours a week, including in class time and out of class time,” he said. “If you take four classes, that’s 40 hours a week, which is the equivalent of a full-time job.”

But Megan McGeehan ’12, also a molecular biology and biochemistry major, says 10 hours a week is an unrealistic dream for most natural science majors.

“It’s great if they’re designing it to be 10 hours a week, but the reality is that it’s so much more,” she said.

Biochemistry major Timothy Fields ’12 says “a very conservative estimate” would be 15 hours a week spent for every natural science class he takes. If 10 hours a week equals one credit, Fields believes he and other natural science majors deserve one and a half credits.

If the resolution is passed by the SGA, it will go on to the Educational Affairs Committee (EAC), a group of five tenured faculty members elected by the faculty at large who have the power to implement changes in course credits.

Provost & Executive Vice President and Professor of English & American Literatures Alison Byerly chairs the EAC.

“It’s important to recognize that there are calculations beyond time spent in class that enter into the designation of what constitutes a course,” she said. “The faculty sense is that we allocate effort from class to class in a way that is consistent.”

But according to Ryan, there is an inconsistency between the credit students receive for classes and the credit teachers receive for classes. Professors receive Instructional Units (IU) for teaching classes similar to how students receive credits for taking classes. Ryan points out that professors get one IU for teaching a lecture and half an IU for teaching a lab.

“If I teach a lab and a lecture, I would get 1.5 IU,” he said. “So I can see why students might wonder, ‘Why don’t we get the same amount of credit?’”

Reginald L. Cook Professor of American Literature Brett Millier believes the key to determining whether or not course credits need to be reassessed lies in the “total hours spent per class,” which encompasses time spent in and out of the classroom.

“It’s hard to put a number on how many hours it takes you to write a paper because it takes different people different amounts of time to write papers, but you have to find some average,” she said. “It’s a complicated puzzle.”

McGeehan has taken 10 classes outside the natural sciences and says from her experience, the workload in those classes hasn’t come close to workloads of her natural science classes.

“Every semester a science class takes up the most time,” she said.

The “one class equals one credit” system is deeply engrained in the culture of the College. Changing how much a course is worth would alter the equality of a liberal arts degree.

“Awarding credit to a course is basically certifying a level of effort that encompasses both time spent in class and level of material covered,” said Byerly. “It would be a fairly substantial change.”

If the EAC passed a resolution for an extra half credit, Millier does not believe humanities courses or humanities professors would be relatively devalued.

“I don’t think that people in this department [ENAM] would be offended by the idea that some classes in other departments would receive more actual credit,” she said.

Wilkinson says that adding an extra half credit for labs would be a serious boon for natural science majors. The added half credit for lab would give students greater flexibility to take their area of study outside the classroom.

“[Half credit for labs] would provide the opportunity for natural science majors to use Winter Term or another class block to do something off campus to bolster their résumé, which is increasingly necessary in these competitive fields,” she said.
But according to Byerly, adding a half credit to certain courses with extensive labs will start a problematic domino effect.

“If you start making those (credit) differentiations, then you can imagine a system where slight fractions are awarded to classes all across the College,” she said. “If you started making too fine a distinction among courses, it would be hard to know where to stop.”

Wilkinson rejects the idea of a domino affect. She says that Middlebury has the resources to evaluate course credits on a class-by-class and department-by-department basis.

“We are a very small college where the course catalog is relatively small,” she said. “I understand that there will be a lot of ripple effects but I don’t think that is a valid reason for not considering [the resolution].”

Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Rick Bunt says that between two-thirds and three-fourths of courses in his department entail an additional three hours of “forced contact hours” in lab time. While neither in favor nor against the resolution, Bunt acknowledges that natural science courses are inherently more time consuming.

“It’s a little unfair,” he said. “But some things are just unfair and you have to deal with it.”

Ryan and Bunt both say they try to compensate for the added class time by scaling back on the lab homework they assign.

“As a teacher, I am cognizant that students are spending an additional three hours in the lab, so the amount of work I require outside of class is a little bit less than what otherwise would be the case,” said Ryan.

But if the resolution is put into place, Ryan and Byerly say they would feel pressure to add additional work to fulfill the one and a half credits, offsetting the goal of the SGA’s resolution.

“If students were getting an additional half credit for lab classes then the workload would definitely have to go up,” said Ryan. “I don’t think that students in the natural sciences are currently doing 50 percent more work.”

“If what you are teaching is worth one and a half credits, you would expect that a student is taking fewer courses around it and you would expect them to do more work,” said Byerly.

Wilkinson says the central disagreement of how much time students spend on natural science courses is indicative of a larger disconnect concerning what teachers expect and the amount of time needed for students to achieve the expectations.
“If [half credit for labs] happens, it will take a lot of discussion between students and professors to come up with an honest measure of how much credit a class is worth,” she said.

Teachers and students both agree that the “one class equals one credit” system is at the very least worthy of a serious dialogue.

“This should be open to a College-wide debate,” said Professor of Mathematics David Dorman. “It’s certainly worth a discussion.”