There is a whole bunch of policy areas in higher education which are what I might call “scaffolding” (others might use the term plumbing). That is, the basic building blocks of how education actually gets done: how classes get scheduled, how credits are defined, awarded and scored, then thrown into buckets and turned into degrees, etc. The lack of logic and consistency behind the existing system(s) frankly boggles the imagination: it’s absolutely an area where a little innovation could go a long way. The problem is that Canadian institutions for some reason treat much of these rules not as changeable parameters but rather as some sort of God-given law that is heresy to question.
Let’s review.
Course Scheduling. Someone, somewhere, decided that day classes (that is, lectures – labs and studio time is different) would be 50 minutes long on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 80 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 2 hours 45 in late afternoons and evenings. I have no idea why. No one does. But everyone does it. Definitely sacred.
Course length. 12/13 weeks (or, very occasionally, 24/26 weeks). Not a week more, not a week less. Sacred.
Credit Systems and Credit Accumulation. How much credit attaches itself to a course? In most institutions across the country, one of the sacred courses described above will be given a credit value of 3 credits, which in theory is related to the number of “contact hours” a student gets per week (three 1-hour MWF classes, or two TTh classes, or one 3-hour seminar). But in some institutions it is given a 0.5 credit value instead. In both systems, 40 courses are usually required to finish an honours degree – one leads to a 120-credit graduation requirement and one leads to a 20-credit requirement. Why the difference? No one knows. They are identical. Within each institution, this number is sacred and cannot be changed, but it does vary from one institution to another. What does not vary is that courses are almost entirely valued at 1/40th of a degree, no more, no less (occasionally 1/20th, but this is increasingly rare). Other credit values are verboten. Again, sacred.
Majors and minors. These are all over the place, not just across institutions but also within an institution. How many courses make for a major? Is it 14? 16? 18? (42/48/54 in a 120-credit world, or 7/8/9 in a 20-credit one). For a double major? For a minor? Despite the sacredness of the 40-course rule for a degree, departments from one end of the country to the other will fight to the bitter end to defend their right to offer programs with entirely bespoke credit values for majors and minors. Profane in the extreme.
Grading. This one is absolutely bananas. Yes, the most common GPA system involves 4-points system. But lots of other places have different scales. Queen’s and Dalhousie work on a 4.3 scale. Manitoba uses a 4.5 scale. York has a 9-point scale. Ottawa and Alberta have 10-point scales. Western, McMaster and Carleton all use 12-points. Why the difference? Who knows? I can’t imagine there is any advantage to students in one or the other, and there is certainly no advantage to students system-wide in having so many grade points. But like credit systems, on any single campus these systems are sacred (just ask the folks at York who have been trying and – as far as I know – failing to switch from a 9- to a 4-point system for nearly a decade). Bizarrely sacred.
And yet, almost none of these things are in fact set in stone. Examples from around the world can show us alternatives. 40 course undergraduate degrees? In Korea, they are typically longer (closer to 50). In Europe, it’s about 30. We could change it if we wanted.
Majors and minors, there is no obvious reason why every program needs to have bespoke graduation rules. There is an interesting reform going on at Brock which is trying to create a more uniform system of honours, majors, double majors, etc., which has the potential to create a much more rational system and greatly reduce the massive work load that falls on the registrar’s office to keep track of all these degree requirements and constantly monitor that students are on track to graduate (people think bespokeness is costless, but it’s really, really not).
But the big pieces that are most in need of being blown up are twin requirements that for-credit learning can only occur in units that are 12-13 weeks in length at a rate of 3 “contact hours” per week. This is a convention that Europe left behind over 20 years ago, mainly because the European Credit Transfer System – that much-overlooked child of the Erasmus Program – requires institutions across the continent to define “credits” not as a function of how many hours a professor teaches (a North American concept which reflects the concept’s origin not as a measure of teaching or learning but as a unit of pension accounting) but rather as a function of how many hours a student is expected to work.
Just imagine if you could get credit-bearing classes that were only four weeks in length (Harvard has something like this with its J-term). Not all classes would need to be like this, but having a stream of short-courses going on parallel to longer ones would give students a lot more options without necessarily causing room-booking hell (it would also make it likelier that universities would more likely to be able put visiting scholars in front of undergraduates, which would be pretty cool). Or imagine if you could offer the same course at different credit values of depending on the amount of work a student was prepared to put in: for instance, 2 credits just to cover the in-class material in an exam, 4 credits if a student was also prepared to do a 20-page independent paper on the subject. Actually, you don’t have to just imagine this, because it’s actually the way many European universities already work. I won’t pretend this approach is cost-free: switching over is a big deal that requires a bananas amount of IT system modification to operationalize (by far the best time to something like this is when you’re on the verge of changing enrolment IT systems anyway). But given the greater flexibility and creativity such a system would allow, it seems to me that at least one institution might find it worth the investment.
I could go on, but you get the idea. So many things that we take for granted as “given” about higher education are in fact a set of extremely idiosyncratic choices made decades ago for long-forgotten reasons that we could change if we had the inclination to do so. How we calculate and issue credit seems to me like one of those where a genuinely innovative university could do some really interesting work.
Who’ll be first?
5 Responses
UAlberta doesn’t have a 10 point system. It had a 9 point system and moved to a 4.0 system years ago.
Awesome!! Who is going to bell the cat…this must start with the academics!!
I really enjoyed today’s topic, Alex. I think it brings me back to so many things that seemed puzzling in my curriculum committee days.
To the points about the 12/13 week course and imagining credit bearing classes of just four weeks:
We did some of this at the short lived Technical University of BC – when I started as a student, we had five week “modules” that usually consisted of four class weeks followed by a “TechWeek” which had presentations, installations, or exams. “Courses” consisted of between 1-3 modules. If I recall, 3 was the most common but there were a surprising number of 2 module (10 week) courses and a few that were just 1 module (5 week). The term length itself was 15.
As a student, I loved this format. It worked better for the way my mind works, and allowed for a more dynamic curriculum. I also thought their use of what we now call hybrid learning (in the early 2000s) was way ahead of most other institutions and that most only caught up to that by Covid.
Alas, TechBC was both ahead of its time and politically challenged.
I’ll be curious to see who finds a way to break out of the conventional pattern next.
The University of Ottawa 10 point GPA scale is even more absurd than it sounds. You receive grades in numbers which are converted to letters which are converted back to numbers.
Through this conversion process a student with an 84% average ends up with a 8.0 GPA.
79% average becomes a 7.0 GPA.
74% average becomes a 6.0 GPA.
86% average becomes a 9.0 GPA.
I think you’re missing the point of scaffolding. The Sistine chapel is rightly admired; the scaffolding Michelangelo was standing on is rightly forgotten. And he couldn’t have got on with The Creation had some Johnny from the Vatican janitorial service insisted on continually reconstructing his scaffolding on more Euclidian lines.
My point isn’t that scaffolding is temporary, but that it’s instrumental; it serves a greater purpose. In the case of your more or less metaphorical university scaffolding, it serves teaching and research, the raison d’être of the university as such. Changing it unnecessarily is mere busy-work, likely to get in the way of those conscientiously trying to do their jobs.
Why do most institutions organize three-credit courses in twelve-week semesters? Who cares? Is it really worth changing, when we could use the time to actually teach those courses? (Or better yet, fire the admins who think up this crap, and lower tuition).
Moreover, actually being consistent in these things saves us from large numbers of abuses. The moment we vary from the forty-two credit major, some looney is likely to go North Korean on us, and declare that 36 credits is plenty enough education in (say) history, so we don’t need anybody to teach Canadian. If we say that an entire course can be taught in a week, we’ll have senior faculty demanding to do all their teaching in four weeks of the summer, and then spend the rest of the year off campus.
Finally, I would point to an empirical example: we actually got new scheduling software here at UBCO which didn’t respect the idea that classes take place in symmetrical courses, taking place on MWF or TH. The result was anarchy and rebellion. Every class seemed to take place at random times and places: an afternoon class might have a second meeting three days later in the morning, on the other side of campus. Nobody could be assured of a day off. Some students had to drive an hour into campus for a single class, because they couldn’t group them. It was a total waste of money and (worse) effort.
Nobody changes the plumbing just because they can.