On April 18, Trinity announced changes to the core curriculum in an email. These changes include eliminating the discovery, waiving the fitness requirement for student-athletes and reducing the Written Communication (WC) and Oral and Visual Communication (OVC) credit requirements from two to one each. Though only some apply to current students, these changes were made to better accommodate a four-credit-hour system.
Trinity is currently in the process of switching to a system with more four-credit-hour classes. Laura Allen, vice-chair of the University Curriculum Council (UCC) and professor of education, noted that this decision came after a review committee submitted a report in 2020 that signaled that four-credit-hour classes would be beneficial for the student body.
“The reason that the report suggests to demarcate four-hour classes were two things. One is to be more in alignment with our peer and aspirant institutions because now we’re in the national liberal arts category,” Allen said. “Another reason, which I think is a more important reason, is that taking four four-hour classes is easier on students than taking five three-hour classes because you don’t have to task switch as much. You can go into more depth.”
Although the switch to four-credit-hour courses has advantages, it has repercussions on Pathways, the core curriculum. David Crockett, professor of political science, explained that the Pathways demand has increased over time.
“Kind of an unofficial rule that I heard faculty say 10 years ago when we first started working on Pathways was one-third of the student’s credit hours should be their major, one-third should be the general education curriculum and one-third should be electives,” Crockett said. “ If you don’t make any changes … now pathways, which used to be a bunch of three-credit courses that might have consumed 35 credit hours or 36 credit hours, now might be 45 or 50 credit hours.”
As a result of this increased demand, the UCC concluded that Pathways must be cut. After deliberation, the majority of proposed changes passed. Some, like the elimination of fitness education credit for student-athletes and the elimination of the discovery, are effective immediately, but the cuts to WC and OVC credits are only effective for students entering Trinity in Fall 2024 or later. Some proposed changes, including one that would have allowed students to replace a third semester of foreign language with a Global Awareness course, will not be enacted.
The Discovery consists of at least nine credit hours in an advanced subject area outside of a student’s primary major. Previous to the implementation of the discovery for the 2021-22 Courses of Study Bulletin (COSB), students were required to take an Interdisciplinary Cluster. Interdisciplinary Clusters were intended to introduce students to a broad topic from several different disciplines. Ashley Douglass, chair of the UCC and associate professor of accounting, commented on how the Discovery was missing its intended mark.
“I think the goal was that students would take a discovery and discover like, ‘Oh, I really love this thing and I’m going to minor in it or I’m going to double major,’” Douglass said. “I don’t know that that really is happening for a lot of students outside of what they were already choosing to minor. … It’s not fulfilling the spirit of having this in-depth dive into something.”
Though changes have been made, cutting Pathways is not a clear-cut road. Although the consensus is that Pathways needed to take up a smaller portion of credit hours, deciding where to cut is difficult due to the nature of college classes.
“Nobody wants to cut their area, right?” Allen said. “For good reasons. There’s a lot of disciplines here that students wouldn’t normally take because they just don’t know about them. In high school, it’s very limited, narrow, what you offer compared to here, that people find their interest and love maybe if you’re taking a pathways class that they wouldn’t have probably taken.”