COAS revamps requirements

Senior Leanne Dodge is ambitious, to say the least.\nThe Bloomington native and Wells Scholar spends her days conducting trials in a cognitive science lab on campus. When she needs a break, she loses herself in a piece of music, playing her violin for hours on end. And in the evenings, she immerses herself in her duties as vice president of the IU College Libertarians.\nTo top it all, Dodge is pursuing three majors -- violin performance, cognitive science and political science.\nIn the past, students like Dodge have found it difficult to explore such a wide array of interests. But a change in graduation requirements by the College of Arts and Sciences will help in facilitating such efforts.\nThe University faculty voted this week to approve the measures. The changes are designed to "provide greater flexibility for students wishing to pursue joint degrees," according to a press release by the College. They will take effect in August 2001, and students pursuing a COAS degree will be able to adhere to either the old or new requirements.\nThe new plan grants greater range of choice in choosing elective credits outside a given course of study. Previously, elective choices were limited to an approved list of courses. Under the new system, those credits can be filled with any combination of courses from an outside school.\nThe new plan also simplifies the distribution requirements for graduation. \nCOAS students are now required to take four courses from each category -- natural and mathematical sciences, arts and humanities and social and historical studies, and one course from each area should be a topics course. The three areas are subcategorized as well. \nThe new plan eliminates the subcategories and requires students to take only one topics course.\n "Topics courses are meant to be a hard start into college study," said COAS associate dean Linda Smith. "But they ended up delaying students' entrance into their actual majors. It made it more difficult to explore different fields of study -- not a good thing."\n Smith said the change is largely in response to student concerns compiled during a semester-long study of the old program's effectiveness last fall. Sophomore Paul Musgrave echoed such sentiments.\n"The current system, which involves subcategories that artificially limit class options, does not broaden, but rather restricts, students' learning opportunities," the history and political science double major said. "If the purpose of a liberal arts education, which COAS provides, is to broaden students' horizons, then the current, ridiculously complex and limiting graduation requirements have been standing in the way of that goal."\nThe new plan allows students to pursue more than one degree simultaneously. The old requirements forced students desiring a second degree to complete an extra 26 hours in COAS outside of those required for the first degree, a stipulation Smith said has existed since the 1960s.\nDeeming the imposition "crippling" for serious students with various interests, Smith said the new plan, which eliminates this requirement totally, will better facilitate such exploration.\n"I think this is a wonderful move," Dodge said. "It will allow students to pursue varied interests without being bound so tightly by specific requirements."\nSmith said the College has been considering changing graduation requirements all year. She noted the change is especially timely with the arrival of the new chancellor.\n"It would not be an overstatement to say that a number of students found the old requirements 'student unfriendly,'" Smith said. "The goal of the new plan is not to weaken curriculum or make it easier, but to fix clunky things that weren't working before"