Lab course credit units

While I am sure that this blog has become too higher ed policy wonky for many, some policy issues have more impact on the day-to-day lives of academics than others.  Today's issue may be one of those.

The federal government, in an effort to more evenly assess the value to the level of instruction, academic rigor, and time requirements of course work is pushing toward a clearer standard for the academic unit.  The main goal is to define the unit for purposes of financial aid.

The proposed standard relies on the Carnegie classifications in which the minimum requirement for one unit is defined as an hour of direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately 15 weeks for one semester or trimester, and adjusting for quarters or differing amounts of time.  For labs, internships, practica, etc. and "equivalent amount of work" is required.

Between my student days and my faculty days I have been associated with six different institutions.  Five of those institutions assigned the organic lab courses one unit for a three hour lab.  The other university assigned 1.5 units.  Under the definition of a unit, assigning one unit to three hours of lab suggests that in terms of time, the minimum for a unit has been met by the in lab activity only in the organic lab course.  Those extra minutes preparing prelabs and lab reports represent effort beyond the minimum.  When one considers research units and all the lab courses a science major takes, the effort expended to earn a science degree is substantially greater than the minimum.

Our students often complain about the workload of science degrees.  I believe that the workload discourages some students from pursuing STEM degrees.  It also makes it more likely that a STEM student will take longer than four years to complete their degree, particularly if that student must work to pay for their education.  Additionally, the nerd stereotype, which also discourages STEM focus among students, suggests that our students have no time for social lives.  A unit analysis supports the stereotype, if our units require more effort than those of other disciplines.

I doubt that many of us would suggest lowering the workload to earn a STEM degree.  Increasing the number of units would also increase the time to a degree.  With the public expectation being that a college degree should be only four years/120 units makes increasing the units for a degree is problematic.

If we want to improve our STEM recruitment and graduation rates we may need to rethink our approach to educating STEM students.  This may require touching third rails of higher education, such as the general education curriculum and our lower level core courses which occupy a large portion of our units.

T.S. Hall