WCGA pursues credit for science labs

Westhampton College Government Association (WCGA) conducted a survey over the past three weeks to get student opinion about awarding credit to science classes with laboratories, after many science students voiced how unfair the unit system has been for such intensive and time-consuming courses.

Katrina Goulden, chairwoman of the academic affairs committee for WCGA, initiated and launched the survey, which was open from Feb. 27 through March 16. She said many science students had brought up the science lab accreditation issue to WCGA throughout the years.

Goulden said it was her goal to voice student opinion and by doing so, hoped to implement change.

Michelle Hamm, associate professor of chemistry, said the issue had been a problem pre-dating the university's conversion to the unit system.

She said, before the unit system, non-lab classes were three credits and classes with lab were four credits. Some academic departments - history and English, for example - wanted to increase to four credits to make their courses more challenging and to assign more reading outside of class, Hamm said.

"That led to a decoupling of class time from the amount of credit," she said.

Susan Breeden, university registrar, said that in May 2006, the university faculty voted to get rid of credits and adopt the unit system. The unit system was not implemented until the fall of 2008.

Before finalizing the unit system, the provost office's Credit Committee's Final Report, April 2006, recommended that the science departments with upper-level classes demanding three hours of class time, plus three hours of lab, plus significant outside study, should give that course an additional half unit, providing a "course package" of 1.5 units.

Goulden said that in May 2006 the faculty approved the recommendations by awarding the intensive language courses 2 units; however, they did not accept the science recommendation.

According to the provost office's credit committee recommendations with amendments as voted by the university faculty in May 2006, the minimum time spent on a one-unit course should be an average of 10-14 hours per week.

Hamm said professors had to evaluate their courses and analyze the amount of time their students should spend studying outside of class, in lecture and in lab, to fit within the 10-14 hour range.

To ensure 1-unit courses fall within the 10-14 hours range, the end-of-semester course evaluations ask students how many total hours they spend a week on a course, Hamm said.

Based on her chemistry course evaluations, Hamm said she has seen evaluations that say students spend from 8 hours a week to 20 hours a week on her courses.

"Sure, this is a wide range," Hamm said, "but 10-14 is realistic for lab oriented courses."

Hamm said she applauds the efforts to grant credit to science laboratories, but she said that for her, the system is never going to go back.

Sallie McSwain, a senior biology major, said she does not think science majors should get extra credit for their labs.

McSwain said she thought that science majors did spend 10-14 hours on their classes including lab. She also said that labs were important to science because they added a lot of experience.

"Thinking about all of my lab sections that I've had, most of them were not a waste of time," McSwain said. "I learned techniques that I've used in my own research and to understand how science is done, and not just talked about."

Keiko Hoen, a sophomore who is majoring in business administration with concentrations in finance and marketing, said she thought science majors deserved science credit for their labs.

"It is essentially another class," Hoen said. "I know that a lot of science majors just prefer to receive something, and I think they should get credit for the work they put in."

Phil Durney is a junior Spanish major and a pre-medical student. He said he spent more time in lab and preparing pre-labs and lab reports than he did in his actual lecture class.

"In the end, you still have to complete assignments and submit them to a separate instructor, just like any other class that you have," Durney said.

He also said that, specific to organic chemistry classes, the lab requires a separate cumulative final exam at the end of the semester.

As a business and leadership studies major, Goulden, who has never taken a science class at Richmond, said she thought science students did spend more time doing work and had to factor in a 2-3 hour lab in their week.

She said that WCGA's goal was to help voice students' opinions, and collecting student's viewpoints on the situation from the survey was the best way to achieve this goal.

With the results of the survey, Goulden said WCGA would present a proposal to credit science laboratories to Stephen Allred, the provost, and to the deans.

"People are always like, 'there is no way to make change,'" Goulden said, "but there is a way to make change at this school.

Contact staff writer Marie Jayme at marie.jayme@richmond.edu