Two new competency graduation requirements to be added to curriculum

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Two new competency requirements for graduation will be added to Central Michigan University’s curriculum — quantitative reasoning and writing intensive.

General Education Director George Ronan, who is working to implement the competencies, said the goal is to ensure students can write and think critically by the time they graduate.

“Oftentimes we are confronted with more and more numbers in society from politicians, news articles and elsewhere,” Ronan said. “Students need to be able to reason through these things.”

This initiative will require small modifications to the curriculum, Ronan said, and will not require students to take numerous additional courses.

“The courses they take will be structured differently,” he said.

These initiatives will help ensure CMU graduates do not fall into the alleged “academically adrift” category.

In “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa assert one-third of undergraduate students fail to develop critical reasoning and writing skills before graduation.

Their study tracked a representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 undisclosed four-year colleges in fall 2005.

They reported at least 45 percent of students did not improve over a two-year period; 36 percent did not show any significant improvement after four years.

Ronan said the numbers are shocking and they are trying to restructure the curriculum to prevent such results at CMU.

“We’ve been interested in general education for a long time,” Ronan said. “There has been an active study for the past seven years, and last May, the Academic Senate passed revisions that I am just now implementing.”

Ronan and the team want to make sure CMU students have a world-class education.

“The goal is just to change curriculum to fit students’ needs better,” Ronan said. “I am very confident that the changes are going to be good for the student without being overly costly.”

Under the new initiative, each major program will determine if a quantitative reasoning course must be added to the curriculum depending on existing courses. Students will not need to take the class within their major because it can be applied in many different disciplines.

The new writing intensive requirement will replace the writing aspect of the current University Program system.

Currently, all offered University Program classes have to include a certain amount of writing. With the new program, only certain classes will be labeled as “writing intensive.”

Students must take four writing intensive classes by the time they graduate: two from UP courses and two from elsewhere.

The existing UP groups will not change. A class will be labeled as writing intensive if the students not only writes, but also receives constant feedback on their writing.

Ronan said students will not have to complete the new requirements within their first two years at CMU.

Another critical source

ABC News also did a study that reported 34 percent of college graduates do not learn anything significant they did not already know.

No available data exists to compare the knowledge of CMU’s graduates to the national average; however, some CMU deans question the authority of the survey.

“Any survey like this that make a bold statement needs to be taken with a grain of salt,” said Kathy Koch, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Services. “Who is qualified to make that statement?”