Double Cores to Be Reviewed

The faculty-student Core Committee may revise a policy that allows students to satisfy two Core requirements with one course, Core Director Susan W. Lewis said yesterday.

Announcing its agenda for the 1989-'90 academic year, the 11-member committee also released plans to review the Quantitative Reasoning Requirement (QRR) and inconsistencies in undergraduates' secondary school preparation.

The three measures make up the second phase of a review of the Core Curriculum, which was created in 1978.

In its first meeting of the fall, the committee reviewed complaints that problems with so-called "double-count" Cores for Foreign Cultures and Historical Study requirements undermine the program's effectiveness. Attention focused on artificially high enrollments in such courses.

"The concern was that the double count was functioning as an artificial incentive which was raising enrollment," Lewis said.

One double-count course, Foreign Cultures 48, "The Cultural Revolution," has had to hold lotteries both times it was offered, Lewis said.

Professors say lotteries "exclude many students who are genuinely interested in the course material while including students who are simply trying to get the two-for-one credit," said Lewis.

One solution before the committee may be to allow double-count courses to be listed under two departments, but to satisfy only one Core credit. Any revision would not occur before next year, said Lewis.

The committee also continued preliminary review of the much maligned QRR, which was broadly criticized in a reaccreditation review of the University last year. The outside review concluded that undergraduate computer and statistical training was cursory and ineffective.

"No one is taking it [the requirement] too seriously," Taxin said. "People are cramming for the data part, and no one considers the computer part an educational experience."

The Core subcommittee on the QRR is split over how to resolve its problems. Some members want only to refine existing programs, while others advocate converting the QRR into an 11th Core discipline that would add coursework to competency tests, said McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry R. Lewis, who is overseeing the QRR review.

That solution would "involve restructuring the Core requirements and would be a decision that would have to go to a faculty vote," Harry Lewis said.

The computer science professor said the QRR should emphasize more conceptual thinking and make students more comfortable with the data analysis it attempts to teach.

"It is important not just to teach people how to do certain kinds of set reasoning but to see them in a context they can relate to...and see that there are sets of tools they can use in the future," he said.

Discussion of new plans for the QRR will also continue throughout the year, he said.

The committee also discussed plans to review undergraduates' high school course records in a study on academic preparation. Last spring, during a faculty review of the Core, professors in the Historical Study and Science departments complained that many students had insufficient backgrounds in these fields.