“Gen Ed’s are supposed to be easy.” Says who? JMU students immediately associate ‘general’ with ‘easy’. This commonly held mindset is actually a big misconception. Many of these courses are actually very challenging. So why does the dreaded “G” in front of all of these courses change the way students view the difficulty of a course?
This is one of the negative connotations the G has acquired over the years that has come to many faculty’s attention. The G was originally intended to be a positive symbol and make JMU’s General Education program distinctive, when it was created in the late 1990s. Although the General Education program continues to do this, it has acquired negative connotations that have led to major reconsiderations. During JMU’s 2011-2012 program review, faculty proposed the idea of removing the G from the course prefix in General Education classes, according to the General Education page on the JMU website. Last year it was confirmed by various members of the JMU community that this was a good idea.
Last year, the JMU General Education program made a concerted effort to reach as many people as possible including instructors who teach General Education courses to listen their opinion about this issue.
“They tried hard to explain why the program was contemplating the removal of the G,” said Dr. Tim Ball, assistant professor and SCOM basic course director, “They wanted to make sure we thought it was a change that needed to happen.”
This January, summer and fall schedules for 2015 will be created with new G-less prefixes. G’s will remain on all students transcripts that have taken General Education courses prior to Fall 2015, but all incoming freshman and transfer students next year will never take a class with a G or have it recorded on their transcript.
“The most important thing to know is that this is a typographic change. Nothing about the program, the clusters, the courses, and the credits is changing,” said Dr. Margaret Mulrooney, associate vice provost of University Programs who oversees the General Education program.
The removal of the G is expected to accomplish three goals. These goals include making course prefixes across the program consistent, facilitating transferability and transcripting for students, and finally to promote more accurate perceptions about the academic rigor of General Education courses, their alignment with the disciplines and the continued value of a liberal education.
“It is something that has been talked about for a couple of years,” said Dr. Eric Fife, director of the School of Communication Studies, “Departments were supposed to discuss it. The cluster one coordinator for General Education is a faculty member in our department so I’m sure she was paying attention to conversations we had.” Fife says he doesn’t think anyone in his department ever expressed a strong objection, as a group, they all seem to be pretty in favor of it.
Fife thinks the removal of the G would achieve the three goals mentioned above. “It should do well with achieving all three of those goals the first two are broader technical goals that are less of an issue as far as I’m concerned. The big one is the perception of General Education classes,” explained Fife.
Is this change going to be confusing to students? “I think initially it will be a little confusing,” answered Fife, “For us there is a struggle because we have a G on all of our material, it’s in the catalog, and on the website, so we have to go through and figure out all the places where it has to be changed. It will be confusing for a little while, but I think overtime, it won’t be a problem for us, and this may be true for other departments too, we only have one set of 100 level classes, all the major classes are 200 or above.”
It will be interesting to see if the main intentions and goals of removing the “G” will be met. Removing the G from a course prefix seems simple. Obviously it is not as simple as we think. So much consideration and thought has gone into this decision, and based on these goals, it seems like this change will be very beneficial. What do you think about this change?
If you have any more questions about the removal of the “G” from General Education classes, you can find more information at http://www.jmu.edu/gened/nomoregs.shtml
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