Criteria, Content, and Outcomes Requirements

Required ISIS Description and Syllabus

Breadth of Courses
Upper-Level Courses

Comparability and Consistency of Offerings

Frequency of Offerings

Faculty Teaching within the Program
Teaching Assistants within the Program

Criteria, Content, and Outcomes Requirements

Courses approved for the General Education Program must meet the comprehensive criteria. Courses must also fulfill the specific content and outcomes for the appropriate General Education area or areas.

Required ISIS Description and Syllabus

A General Education course should have a description on the syllabus and on ISIS that reinforces and includes the GE status of the course. There should also be a brief indication of how the course design and assignments encourage the development of essential outcomes of the Program, thus helping students to understand the importance of a liberal arts and science education.

Breadth

Since most GE courses are introductory and may represent the only course a student studies in a subject, a course approved for General Education must provide a breadth of experience in content and/or in methods in the area or areas in which it is approved.

Such breadth is found typically in introductory courses, with course numbers below the 100 level and most often below fifty. The syllabus should additionally stress the introductory nature of the course, the course's relation to the GE Program, and the specific ways the course fulfills the stated GE criteria, especially in the areas of written and oral communication. Titles and course descriptions should also suggest the introductory nature of the course.

Upper-Level Courses

Some upper-level courses are approved for General Education. These courses should contain a breadth of subject matter or application that distinguishes them from other departmental courses offered at the upper level, a fact that should be made clear in the course's title, description, and assignments.

Upper-level courses approved for General Education may have prerequisites, but the prerequisites must also be courses approved for General Education. The prerequisites may be offered by the department or by other departments.

Comparability and Consistency of Offerings

General Education courses must also offer consistency of instruction and focus. When a department or instructor substantially changes a course’s content, instructional design, size, or other central element, the course should be reviewed as a new offering by the General Education Curriculum Committee.

Particular care should be taken by departments and in the review process to ensure that different offerings of a General Education course, such as those taught through the Saturday & Evening Program or as a Guided Independent Study course, or in the summer or winter session, are comparable to the version taught during the traditional semester.

Consistency and comparability in grading is also important in the General Education Program. Ordinarily, courses approved for General Education reflect the College's recommended grade distributions. Oversight of grading is a central responsibility of faculty supervision but is reviewed by GECC and EPC.

Frequency of Course Offerings

Courses approved for General Education should be readily available to students and must be an integral part of course offerings. Consistency and comparability are more likely and more easily ensured when courses are offered on a regular basis. Ordinarily, courses offered less frequently than once every two years will not be approved for the General Education Program. An approved course offered less frequently will be reviewed as a new offering.

Faculty Teaching within the Program

The Educational Policy Committee expects the College's best and most experienced teachers to participate in General Education as instructors and as conscientious guides and supervisors to teaching assistants (see below). This ensures the quality and consistency of the courses offered for General Education.

This also helps to ensure that GE courses provide a consistent educational experience, both across semesters and when multiple sections of a course are offered within one semester. Consistency within a department should also be developed by common expectations for courses and by sharing materials and syllabi.

Departments may, on occasion, find it advisable or necessary to assign a visitor or adjunct to teach a GE-approved course. Whenever possible, these instructors should be provided with materials and advice from the tenured faculty who have taught the course. Departments should not routinely assign GE-approved courses to visitors or adjuncts.

Teaching Assistants within the Program

Teaching assistants may provide additional office hours for students, help with grading, lead discussion or lab sections of a course or, in some cases, teach independent sections of a multi-section course under careful faculty supervision.

Ordinarily, teaching assistants are assigned to teach sections of introductory courses when it is not only desirable but necessary to keep the class size small—for instance, in elementary language instruction classes and in rhetoric classes.

Departments should not ordinarily assign teaching assistants primary instructional responsibility for upper-level General Education courses; if it is necessary to assign a graduate student to teach an upper-level course, special arrangements for faculty grading of any graduate students in the course must be made.

When teaching assistants are used in General Education courses, the department has a special responsibility to ensure comparability of goals, substance, quality, and grading in all sections of the course. The efforts of all instructors in multiple-section General Education courses must be coordinated by the faculty in charge.

When teaching assistants work with General Education courses, faculty supervisors must ensure that they are adequately trained and supervised. In reviewing courses in which teaching assistants are used, a description of the methods used to select, train, and supervise the teaching assistants must be included with the review materials.

It is especially important that teaching assistants who are given responsibility for individual sections (as in language instruction, Interpretation of Literature, and Rhetoric courses) have comprehensive preparation and on-going oversight. The General Education Curriculum Committee and the Educational Policy Committee expect additional information on the training and supervision of teaching assistants in these courses.