Promises, Promises

Students entering in the fall of 1982 will be required to select eight half courses from the five main areas of the Core Curriculum. --Dean Rosovsky's Report on the Core Curriculum, May 1979

That was six months ago. The Standing Committee on the Core Curriculum had difficulty this week finding two half-course Core exemptions for students in mathematics and science concentrations. Without these exemptions, these concentrators would have to take ten Core half-courses.

The Educational Resources Group (ERG) heard of the committee's troubles this week and panicked. ERG members sent the committee a letter reminding it of Rosovsky's guarantee. Some Core committee members believe that "hard science" concentrators will not be able to bypass the "life science" part of the Core. These concentrators then would only qualify for a half-course exemption in Science A, reducing their Core requirement to nine, not eight half-courses.

The Core committee insists it will dig up the other half-course exemption for these students somehow, but some ERG members have lost their faith in Core promises. James Henderson '80, the member of ERG who drafted the letter, said ERG approved the Core Curriculum, last year in part because the committee agreed it would not increase the Core requirements. "One of the things they kept pounding at us was that the Core would be no more than eight half-courses," Henderson said.

Owen J. Gingerich, professor of Astronomy and the History of Science and member of the Core subcommittee on Science, said yesterday he believed most science concentrators probably have taken enough science courses which overlap the courses in the Science B category to exempt them from that Core requirement.

But Otto T. Solbrig, professor of Biology and chairman of the Science subcommittee, is not so sure. I'll have to study the whole situation," he said.