Students in Georgia’s public colleges soon will be able to get at the heart of their passions faster following a core curriculum policy change from the state Board of Regents.
The board that governs Georgia’s 35 public colleges and universities approved a new core curriculum Wednesday for undergraduate students’ first 42 course hours. The new policy goes into effect in fall 2011 for four-year colleges and in fall 2012 for two-year colleges.
The old core curriculum specifies how each of the 42 hours should be spent in the classroom, but the new core sets minimums in those areas to allow institutions up to 11 hours to carve out a specialty requirement such as more foreign language, graphic design or technology classes.
“In other words, students will be able to go to an institution where there is a core that meets their interest,” said George Rainbolt, Georgia State University philosophy department chairman and a leader of the Core Curriculum Evaluation Committee.
Gainesville State College President Martha Nesbitt said she supports the new core curriculum and said it will allow colleges to “tweak” their core requirements to develop their own themes and distinguish colleges from one another. She said it will be up to Gainesville State’s faculty to determine the college’s core focus.
Rainbolt said the new core policy also caters to students because it makes transfers seamless from the system’s two-year colleges to the system’s four-year colleges. Instead of requiring students to complete all course hours in a certain area for the hours to transfer, students can transfer nearly all successfully completed courses to other system schools.
A new facet of the core requires students to take a global perspective class. Rainbolt said classes on world religions or global poverty would qualify, for example.
Another result of the policy change is undergraduates will be assessed on their knowledge of course material. Each institution in the University System of Georgia will determine its own assessments, which could include national tests, evaluating improvements between mid-term and final term papers or reviewing portfolios containing various course work.
Rainbolt said professors within the university system will review data generated by other institutions’ assessment processes. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools also will play a role in scoring assessments, he said.
The idea is to spread the knowledge of assessment around, Rainbolt said. There are no financial penalties for schools who do not pass muster.
“I think it’s relying a lot on the power of shame. And shame can be very powerful,” he said. “... I think institutions will do a lot when some program sends up its journalism assessment and some other journalism professor says this program is not good at all. I think there’s a lot of power in assessment by peers.”
Rainbolt said at the heart of the assessments is informing students of what they need to have learned by the end of a course.
“Telling students these are your learning outcomes, this is what you should know, is vital,” he said. “... You have a learning goal, a learning outcome, you need to check and see if students are in fact making progress.”
He said though undergraduates have long been required to pass the state Regents’ Test, Georgia’s higher education programs have been lacking an effective assessment of student learning.
Nesbitt said the new assessments “absolutely” are a good thing and Gainesville State will not have to make many drastic changes to comply.
“The main thing that we’re going to have to do is to have the learning outcome assessments and have them approved by the Council on General Education made up of various academic administrators across the system,” she said. “We were already doing some assessments and we are in the process of strengthening those assessments. It’s the requirement in higher education right now, to be able to show you’re doing what you say you’re doing.”