Vice provost: Curriculum won’t keep students from graduating on time
USC has approved nearly all the courses that will be a part of the Carolina Core, the university’s new set of general education requirements.
So far, the university has given 200 courses the OK to satisfy parts of the new requirements, said Helen Doerpinghaus, a vice provost and the dean of undergraduate studies, who’s also the co-chair of USC’s Carolina Core committee.
That includes about 90 percent of the courses that will be a part of the program, she said, including heavily used courses like English 101 and 102.
“We’ve done all the big ones,” Doerpinghaus said.
Any additional courses to the university’s general education will probably come from faculty suggestions, she said.
“I hope we get new ones every semester — a handful all the time — just to add some choice and dimension,” Doerpinghaus said.
The new requirements establish 10 core areas, like “scientific literacy” and “values, ethics and social responsibility,” that students will have to take courses in.
The program, which was approved in 2009, rolled out last fall.
To get the new guidelines out, the university “reviewed and refreshed” its general education courses, Doerpinghaus said.
That process mostly entailed minor tweaks to curricula, Doerpinghaus said, but others have been more substantial.
English 102, for example, has been updated to add information literacy, which includes instruction on how to make use of technology.
The rollout last semester was largely successful, Doerpinghaus said.
USC trained advisers in the summer on the new system before incoming freshmen got to campus and found that many were panicked about how it would go, but Doerpinghaus said the two sets of requirements were fairly similar, so those fears were mostly quelled.
“The advisers were really nervous,” Doerpinghaus said. “When they realized that a lot of things haven’t changed, that they were sort of timeless, that helped.”
Transfer students, too, were concerned that credits they brought to the university would no longer count. Around 40 percent of students who transfer to USC bring credits with them.
Doerpinghaus said she also met with representatives of the state’s 16 technical colleges to clarify the requirements, because students at those schools comprise many of USC’s transfers.
USC still accepts all the classes it used to, Doerpinghaus said, but transfer students could run into new requirements, like the information literacy and values, ethics and social responsibility courses, for which the university has tried to build work-arounds.
For the information literacy requirement, for example, a one-credit-hour online course that will satisfy it is being offered.
As a result, Doerpinghaus said, USC hasn’t seen any issues with transfer students being unable to graduate on time because of the Carolina Core requirements.
“We are really committed to people finishing in four years,” Doerpinghaus said. “The provost told us when started developing the Carolina Core, ‘It cannot slow people down.’”