Recently, there have been rumors flying around about the possibility of fundamental change in the way RPI organizes its curriculums. Specifically, there has been discussion about migrating from a four times four-credit class schedule to a five times three-credit schedule as the baseline for an undergraduate semester. Or rather, there has been talk of reverting to the three-by-five structure; the Institute had just that setup up until fairly recently.
Should we go back to the three-by-five, I’m afraid that we would see several semesters of rather serious disorder. Such a switch would require massive overhauls of nearly every course syllabus and curriculum on campus. The current schema allots approximately four hours of class time per week per class for instruction. There are 15 class weeks in a semester, so under the four-by-four, each class gets 60 hours of instruction time. By switching to the three-by-five, each class would only get three hours of instruction time in a week, meaning that there would only be 45 hours of class time per course in a semester.
For many professors, the 25 percent reduction would be very significant, and each course would probably have to be refactored to accommodate the change. This would create an incredible burden, both on the course coordinators designing the syllabi and the students who have to act as guinea pigs. In fact, it would be much the same as the original change to the four-by-four. In the words of Corey Lagunowich ’02, a former editor in chief of The Poly and a student directly following the transition, “Somewhere along the way, the academic credit system lost all logic and meaning.” He noted the difficulty that professors were having in adjusting the content and difficulty of the courses to match the new expectations resulting from the modification.
The strain would affect the curriculums of entire departments, as well. Courses would start reducing the breadth and depth of the materials they cover, and the majors would have to adjust. No matter how it might be implemented, this would create problems for all the sophomores and juniors at the time; people would need—or want—to take certain courses, but those courses will have fundamentally changed. How will we be able to cope with this without another multi-year period of confusion?
Last, but not least, I don’t think that the change is at all necessary. The two hour blocks give professors time to go deeper into a topic without being interrupted, and they make hands-on studio classes a reality, oftentimes without requiring a separate laboratory component. The four-by-four makes scheduling easier—it’s hard scheduling five courses for a 20-credit load ... can you imagine trying to fit in seven for 21 credits? And finally, the workload is much more manageable with four-credit classes; we are able to focus more on fewer topics rather than cramming such a wide variety into a semester.
