A new base curriculum will be offered to the incoming Class of 2029 and subsequent years, two years after Lafayette College faculty voted to revise it.
The updated curriculum, formally known as the Common Course of Study, or CCS, will be defined by learning outcomes in place of specific “attributes” from academic divisions, according to Mary Roth, a Curriculum and Education Policy Committee member and a civil and environmental engineering professor.
“The Steering Committee did expect that the new CCS would help students understand the rationale for the classes they need to take to complete those requirements,” Roth wrote in an email.
A maximum of 13 courses — depending on individual second language course requirements — compose a new student’s Common Course of Study qualification, compared to the former 15.
Some of the new sections of the curriculum are “Humanistic or Artistic Inquiry, Analysis or Creation,” “Study of Social Activity,” “Study of the Natural World (with lab)” and “Human Interaction with the Natural World.”
A “Global Perspectives” and “Critical Engagement with Culture and Society” course is also required to fulfill the requirements.
The curriculum previously required a “Quantitative Reasoning” course and now provides a “Computational Reasoning” option as well.
Some of the requirements that have remained consistent across the revisions are the First-Year Seminar course, a four-course writing requirement and a second language requirement.
“Most attributes of the new CCS don’t directly map to the current CCS,” said Luis Schettino, the current chair of the faculty Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee. “While there are two or three attributes that map flawlessly, like a writing course will still be a writing course, most of the other ones are not.”
Current students will not be affected by the new curriculum requirements. Schettino said that current students and future students will be able to see different attributes and requirements when registering for courses.
The three-year period that the two base curricula will coexist could cause confusion, according to geology professor Lawrence Malinconico, a member of the Curriculum and Education Policy Committee.
“Any new courses coming in have to meet one of these designations,” Malinconico said of new course attributes. “They might also have to meet one of the old designations.”
“There still have to be enough courses for you to satisfy the requirements,” Malinconico said of the Class of 2028, the last class that will follow the current course of study. “In addition to starting to have courses for someone who starts this year to meet these new requirements.”
Roth said she believed there may be some confusion as the new program is laid out, but she clarified that the Registrar and the Educational Policy Committee “are doing a good job of preparing the campus for the upcoming changes.”
Markus Dubischar, a co-chair of the Curriculum and Education Policy Committee, explained that revisions to curricula are a normal requirement by the college and accreditation agencies. The last revision was approved in February 2012.
“We want it to be really methodical because CCS is important,” he said. “It’ll last for another 10 years or so.”
According to Dubischar, there were two phases in the process of making the new curriculum: a review phase and a revision phase.
The review phase began in the Fall 2019 semester, starting with collecting data on how students migrated through the curriculum from the Registrar and the Office of Institutional Research. Open meetings were also held for faculty and students, in addition to online surveys, giving the committee a broader sense of issues to focus on during the revision process.
Once the review phase was completed, the committee moved to the second phase of revision, beginning in January 2021 and ending in May 2023, when it was approved 95-12.
More information on the new curriculum can be found on the college website.
