FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT

THE PRELIMINARY CURRICULUM PROPOSAL

1. How can a science or engineering student possibly fulfill all these requirements?

BASIC SKILLS AND CAPACITIES

It is important to remember that several of the requirements could be

met in a single course or in courses that students would take to fulfill other requirements. This is true in each of the following cases.

Writing. For example, Rice 101 would qualify as one of the four intensive writing courses and also as the oral presentation course. It is likely also that a number of the "ways of knowing" courses would also qualify as intensive writing courses, as might a number of elective courses. Finally, a new writing center designed specifically to help science and engineering students learn to write in a manner appropriate to their fields will make it possible for professors in those fields to assign papers and to receive professional assistance in critiquing and grading those papers. Thus, three of the four intensive writing courses would normally be courses taken to satisfy either the "ways of knowing" requirement or requirements of the major.

Languages. If it appears to our committee that the faculty supports a language requirement&emdash;a plausible but not foregone outcome&emdash;it appears increasingly likely that we would ask for a competence tests rather than a course requirement.

Ethics and Moral Reasoning. As noted in our preliminary proposal, we encourage individual departments to help students satisfy this requirement by consciously incorporating a substantial ethical dimension into all majors. This need not require an extra course, but could be regarded as a normal part of a student's pre-professional training.

The Arts. If it appears possible, and if the faculty believes it desirable, all students might be required to gain some exposure to the fine arts, either by taking courses or by participation in one of the arts. If a student chooses to fulfill the requirement by taking a course, as many would, it is quite likely that one or more of the courses in the Historical Thinking and Textual Analysis categories under "Ways of Knowing" could satisfy this requirement.

Teamwork and Collaboration. Most engineering students should find it easy to fulfill a teamwork and collaboration requirement in the normal course of engineering major. In any case, we see this as an item to be considered in the future and not likely as part of our immediate recommendations.

Health and Physical Education. This is a current requirement and, if retained, would involve no change for our students.

In sum, with the exception of Rice 101, science and engineering students should be able to meet all the Basic Skills and Capacities requirements in the course of their majors or in the "Ways of Knowing" courses. They might, of course, meet them in elective courses, but that should not be necessary.

WAYS OF KNOWING

Scientists on our committee have devised plausible degree plans for several science majors. These make it clear that science students can meet all the requirements we are suggesting, even if they receive no AP credits of any sort, without increasing the number of courses they must take outside their major. A key assumption of these plans is that all science students (and all engineering students as well) would satisfy both Scientific Knowledge requirements and deems least one, and perhaps both, of the Scientific and Technological Reasoning requirements in the normal course of their majors. Thus, the "Ways of Knowing" requirement would normally involve no more than seven courses for science and engineering students.

AP credit. In our preliminary proposal, we suggested that none of these requirements could be satisfied by AP credit. We are rethinking this. We have no objection to the acceptance of AP credit in the fulfillment of the major, if a given department deems this appropriate. Since this is routinely done in science and engineering departments, we think it plausible that AP credit might be used to satisfy the Scientific Knowledge requirement. We continue to feel, however, that students should not be able to use AP credit to exempt themselves from courses in the other Ways of Knowing categories. An AP test in history may provide assurance that a student knows that the Civil War occurred before the Korean War and is able to identify major historical figures and dates correctly, but that student is highly unlikely to have been exposed to historical thinking as it is practiced by professional research scholars. Similar rationales obtain for the other categories in this set of requirements.

Conclusion: The proposed curriculum is quite feasible in terms of the workload placed on students, even those in science and engineering. They should have as much or more opportunity to take courses within and outside their majors as they now do.