Here at Dartmouth, we do not discriminate. Not against people, and certainly not against courses.
I have a required x-hour for my organic chemistry class and a six hour lab every week where we labor over reactions until the cows come home. I get one credit for the class. I have friends whose foreign language classes require them to wake up early every morning for drill. They get a single credit as well. Then there are those who have managed to get into popular courses about global music or vampires, which require students to work hard on demanding tasks such as shaking maracas. Of course, they receive one credit as well. Indeed, all classes are equal in the eyes of the registrar.
Dartmouth is one of the few colleges I know that still assigns the same credit to every course it offers. While this system makes navigating through credit requirements a whole lot easier, it is far too simplistic given the breadth of courses available at the College. No matter how demanding or time consuming a class might be, we can receive at most one credit for taking it. An advanced science class with lab requires much more work than an introductory course for non-majors, and the amount of credits given should reflect this fact.
Aside from making science majors happier, assigning weighted credits based on the rigor of a class will allow for greater flexibility and variety in the courses offered at Dartmouth. Most schools give a handful of credit hours to regular courses but offer smaller, single credit seminar classes that meet for perhaps an hour a week. In contrast, we have an all or nothing system. If professors here wish to offer a class on a particular topic they're interested in, they are obliged to teach a full-fledged course that meets three to four hours a week.
Chris Talamo recently commented on the need to create more seminar courses for upperclassmen ("Sharing the Seminar," Jan. 18). However, asking professors to develop and teach an entirely new class may be too great a demand for faculty members who already have full teaching loads. Such courses would also be difficult to reconcile with our current credit assignment system, where every class has to receive the same credit and is consequently expected to be of similar rigor. If the College were to allow classes to have different credit values, however, professors could easily create courses that require varying levels of work and commitment.
Students would undoubtedly embrace the opportunity to occasionally take interesting courses that do not demand the same degree of commitment as typical Dartmouth classes. I know I'm not the only one here who has wanted to take a fourth class in a subject I am curious about, but did not want to put in the extra time and effort that an additional full-fledged class requires.
An added benefit to weighted credits is that grades received in classes with fewer credits will have a smaller impact on students' GPAs. Currently, the NRO option is the only way for students to take classes they are interested in without the fear that doing poorly will negatively impact their GPAs. However, getting a NR on a transcript never looks good. Some departments also, for one reason or another, notoriously refuse to allow its courses to be NROed. Having weighted credits provides a nice alternative to the NRO system, since grades received in classes worth fewer credits would have a negligible effect in the long run.
Switching away from our single credit system will admittedly make course planning more complex. Nevertheless, this change might actually make it easier for students to create manageable course loads. If every class is assigned a weighted credit, students can more accurately determine how much time they are expected to put into a class they are considering. Establishing a maximum and minimum number of credit hours per term is also a much more meaningful way of regulating course load than the current two to four class range that the College mandates.
The whole point of a liberal arts education is to allow students to dabble a little in every subject. A more flexible method of assigning course credits will hopefully increase the variety of classes available and let us do just a little more dabbling.
