Five years after the Pilot Curriculum experiment kicked off, College administrators are now ready to submit their plan for a redesigned curriculum to the school's faculty for approval.
The new curriculum would feature some alterations to the sectors that currently make up the General Requirement, three fewer classes, a new emphasis on cultural analysis and an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies.
A year in planning, the proposed curriculum will be voted on by the school's faculty in an April 19 meeting. If approved, it will first be implemented with the freshman class entering in the fall of 2006.
A draft of the proposal was sent to faculty two weeks ago for review. Forming the proposal was a highly collaborative process, as faculty, students, alumni and administrators were all consulted.
Another significant change in the proposed new curriculum would be that AP credits would no longer be allowed to fulfill general requirements. Currently, they may count for some -- but not all -- sectors.
The quantitative data analysis, writing and foreign language requirements would remain unchanged.
"Some of our goals in crafting the new proposal have been to reduce the number of requirements, to simplify them and to focus them primarily on the areas of general education where we have learned that students will not venture if left to their own devices," College Dean Dennis DeTurck said.
He added that the new curriculum will be "something between the current General Requirement and what students in the Pilot are doing."
The decision to reduce the number of General Requirement courses, DeTurck said, resulted from the observation that Pilot Curriculum students -- who have only four requirements they need to fulfill -- use their freedom in course selection in "imaginative" and constructive ways.
The Pilot Program has demonstrated, he said, that there is a "hardy, resilient curriculum in the College that is essentially independent of the requirements."
Citing a distinct "academic culture" among College students, DeTurck elaborated by saying that Pilot Curriculum students took certain classes in large numbers even though they did not fulfill a requirement and are not generally regarded as being easy.
For example, Pilot Curriculum students have taken Economics 001 and 002 at the same rate as standard curriculum students even though those classes fulfill requirements only in the standard curriculum.
Also, in aggregate, Pilot Curriculum students have made decisions on issues such as choosing a major, deciding whether or not to double major and traveling abroad similarly to students in the standard curriculum.
Although DeTurck said that most of the current seven sectors in the General Requirement "will be recognizable" under the new curriculum, there will be two new interdisciplinary sectors. One of these will be in natural sciences and mathematics and the other in humanities.
However, unlike classes in the Pilot Curriculum, which feature interdisciplinary courses co-taught by professors from different departments, professors will be encouraged to develop interdisciplinary classes on their own.
"It's hard to work together. It's unnatural," DeTurck said. He added, though, that if a group of professors decided to develop a co-taught class on their own, the school would support it.
The main problem with many of the unsuccessful co-taught courses in the Pilot Program, he said, was that team-teaching was imposed from above, rather than allowed to develop naturally among the faculty.
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Rebecca Bushnell -- who oversees the graduate and undergraduate SAS schools -- cited Penn's renewed emphasis on integrated knowledge as the impetus for creating more interdisciplinary options.
DeTurck also cited the popularity of such "flourishing" interdisciplinary majors as Philosophy, Politics and Economics and International Relations as a reason for the change.
One aspect of the proposal that remains unclear is a potential cultural analysis requirement. The faculty is still debating whether or not to make a culturally focused class a requirement -- similar to the current quantitative data analysis courses which require that students use math or statistics to analyze a set of problems -- or simply to recommend that students take such a class.
Bushnell said that the decision to revise the curriculum did not come out of discontent with its current form.
"This is just something institutions do routinely," she said, adding that the College needed to "evaluate if [the current curriculum] was the best curriculum for our students."
DeTurck said, however, that the current General Requirement allows students to "evade the spirit of the various requirements" while still technically fulfilling them.
The Committee on Undergraduate Education -- composed of faculty, administrators and students -- will meet Friday to consider any recent faculty recommendations and possibly make revisions to the proposal.
Monday, April 11, there will be a student forum on the College curriculum at 4:00 p.m. in the Class of '47 Room in Houston Hall, to be followed by another CUE revision session if necessary.
The proposal will ultimately be brought before the faculty for a formal vote on April 19. Given the high amount of input the faculty have had into forming the new curriculum, both Bushnell and DeTurck were optimistic about it passing. DeTurck estimated that the proposal's chances were "more than 60 percent."
