It is the one part of your degree that you have no control over: general education requirements. Whether you like it or not, courses that are completely unrelated to your major stand between you and graduation.
However, these requirements may soon be changing.
The GER Review Task Force has been charged with making recommendations about possible modifications to the requirements, which have remained untouched since 1994, Chair John Ambrose said.
“One needs to review what you’re making people study carefully,” Faculty Senate Chair Nina Allen said.
According to Ambrose, the Task Force will make suggestions for minor changes to GER in light of comparisons to peer institutions and other institutions within the UNC System.
“We also want to make sure [the GER] is doing what it is supposed to do-give students a fairly wide academic experience,” Ambrose said.
One change that has been speculated among the members calls for a reduction in the total number of credit hours required for completion of the GER, which currently stands at 50-53 hours, Ambrose said.
This credit hour requirement is higher than those found at other peer and local institutions, he said.
Ambrose also noted that the GER represents a “menu approach to general education,” allowing students to choose from a variety of courses to fulfill requirements. The Task Force will consider changing to a more thematically-based GER, he said.
Finally, the Task Force will seek to make the GER “more transportable from one major to another,” Ambrose said.
Ambrose said that students often experience problems when switching majors and sometimes do not receive credit for courses they took under the GER of their previous major.
“One of the major issues that the GER [Task Force] is trying to address is to make them more portable from major to major,” Jim Martin, Faculty Senate member, said.
This is an issue the Task Force will seek to remedy in its recommendation, Ambrose said.
“The whole point of the GER is to have a well-rounded college experience,” James Kling, student representative on the Council of Undergraduate Education, said.
The Council of Undergraduate Education is one of the bodies the Task Force is consulting in the review process, along with all the colleges, the Faculty Senate, the Student Senate and the University Course Curriculum Committee.
“The problem is we basically have two types of colleges: technical and professional,” Kling said.
Kling, a junior in political science, supports the shift of the GER for students enrolled in technical majors toward a greater emphasis in professional requirements and vice versa, to ensure that students gain exposure to classes that they normally may not encounter in their fields of study.
“We want classes that are not going to be a waste of time to take,” Kling said.
Martin echoed this concern.
“We do not want to see academic quality compromised,” Martin said.
Some faculty members were concerned that the proposed GER reductions were really intended to be cost-cutting measures by the University.
Martin says that the Faculty Senate intends to maintain “constructive dialogue” with the Task Force throughout the review and recommendation process.
The Task Force is composed of 16 administrators and faculty members. It was created in the fall of 2004, when it was decided that it was time to review the GER after a decade of continuation.
The Task Force should decide on its recommendations by March or April, and they will then present these to the entire campus community for suggestions before sending them to the provost and University Operations Committee for ratification; however, Kling anticipates the changes to the GER will not be binding on current students and will only apply to those who enroll in the fall of 2007 or later.
