Bracing for Change: Randolph Rolls Out New Course Schedule

Written By John Ruml ‘17

Published February 2015

The new schedule aims to set specific
periods to reduce conflicts and
alleviate difficulties during course scheduling.
Photo courtesy of Randolph College

Beginning with Fall semester 2015, the College will be implementing a new system that restructures the way it handles course scheduling. This new system, devised by Dean of the College Carl Girelli, intends to alleviate the stress that is faced by students and advisors during course scheduling.

“Because our current system causes a certain amount of overlaps and embedding,” explained Girelli, “a lot of students run into scheduling conflicts. It places an unnecessary limit on the kind of courses that those students are allowed to take.”

One common scheduling conflict arises when a student needs to schedule classes across multiple departments. One of these students is Will Webb ’16, a math major and a classics minor. “I had Calc III, Greek, and Physics all scheduled all at the same time. While I was able to work with my professors to reschedule those classes, there still remained a conflict on Mondays, so now I’m double booked.”

The new system seeks to eliminate this problem by establishing rigid, on-the-hour blocks for 3-credit courses. MWF classes will meet for three blocks a week of exactly 50 minutes per day and TTh classes will meet for two blocks a week of exactly 75 minutes per day. “This will allow us to use our time here more efficiently,” said Girelli, “not only to use more hours of the week, but also to use more days of the week.”

However, several faculty members feel as though the new system cheats their students out of valuable class time. “I understand that we need to alleviate concerns about scheduling,” says History Professor Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, “but my concern is that this seems to have a particularly high cost for a not particularly high reward.”

The new schedule forces teachers that have been utilizing three 60-minute blocks per week to trim 30 minutes of class time each week from their 14-week course each semester. If you do the math, that adds up to 7 fewer hours of each class per semester—the equivalent of cutting two whole weeks from a course. “With tuition prices rising,” says Bentley Kennedy-Stone ’16, “It doesn’t make sense for students to be paying more, and getting less.”

“It is an unfortunate thing from several points of view,” lamented History Professor Brad Geisert. “Students are going to be receiving a watered-down version—well, perhaps it’s even fair to call it a ‘dumbed-down’ version—of the course. The courses will suffer in both breadth and depth.” Geisert is worried that by cutting time for class discussions about current controversies, students will lose a sense of the complexity of the material. “The one thing that I always loved about the College is that faculty had the freedom to teach the way they wanted to, but now it’s not going to be like that anymore.”

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools-Commission on Colleges (SACS-COC), our accrediting agency, defines a credit hour in its regulations as: “Not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester…or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time.” For example, SACS-COC lets Randolph treat a 50-minute “Carnegie unit” as a full contact hour. Under the new schedule, 3-credit courses will still count for same amount of credits, even if they meet for 150 minutes instead of 180 minutes.

Math Professor Paul Irwin had the new schedule and the old schedule sitting side-by-side on his chalkboard. Arrows and question marks littered the board. “This edict from the Dean’s office came to us with very bad timing,” said Irwin, “but what really upsets me about this decision is the fact that neither faculty nor students were involved.” While Girelli’s new schedule was modeled on an earlier concept that faculty were involved in, this new schedule was not voted on by faculty.

Some professors, however, are cautiously optimistic about the change. English Professor Mara Amster hopes that it will give students more opportunities to take classes they’re interested in, while Adjunct Theatre Professor Patti Rapiejko hopes that the new schedule will address some of Randolph’s “woeful waiting list problems.”

“What this means for Introductory Physics,” says Professor Peter Sheldon, “is that I’ll have to restructure it into a 4-credit course instead of a 3-credit one. I probably should have done that already. Honestly, I don’t know if this new schedule is going to be a problem or not; there’s too many variables. It’s a test. It’s an experiment—let’s try it out and see.”