The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate's recommendation that science departments in the School of Arts and Sciences award an additional half credit for courses with mandatory laboratory sections has been met with a negative response from administrators.
The Senate's resolution, passed on Feb. 21, called on departments to consider adopting a model in which the lecture section of a course would count for one credit and the co-requisite lab section would count for an additional half credit if it lasts at least two-and-a-half hours.
TCU Associate Treasurer Kate de Klerk, a sophomore who authored the resolution, explained that this initiative was created with the hope of granting students proper recognition for their work.
"Students need to be rewarded for what they do," de Klerk said. "Whether that's spending five or six additional hours on these labs, then it seems to me slightly unfair that that's not being recognized."
This same sentiment was noted in the resolution, which cited the fact that that lab sections often involve an additional two-and-a-half hours of in-class time, the amount of time usually dedicated to a full credit course.
De Klerk last week championed the Senate's recommendations in meetings with the chairs of the science departments, but found that they were largely unreceptive towards the proposed changes.
"I met with all the science department heads and none of them were super excited about what I was doing," she said.
The main reason for this, de Klerk noted, was that the existing lab policy had already been well thought out by administrators and undergoes regular review.
"I think I certainly ruffled some feathers there, and that's totally understandable because they put a lot of time and effort and thought into these polices … and I see their commitment to the students," she said.
Following discussions with the department chairs, de Klerk also decided that the resolution's recommendations should apply mostly to biology courses rather than physics and chemistry courses, whose labs generally do not exceed two hours.
Explaining his support for the proposal, TCU Senator Dan Pasternack, a junior who previously served as treasurer for the Tufts Pre-Medical Society, noted that courses with mandatory labs require a greater time commitment and are often more demanding than those without.
"If you want to have a lighter schedule knowing that you're taking such a demanding course load, then you wouldn't have to take more classes because you have that extra credit," he said.
De Klerk added that because the science course counts as one credit, some students might underestimate the commitment of the class and take on a greater workload than they can handle.
Adding the extra half credit, she said, could mitigate this by pushing some students over the 5.5 credit limit, forcing them to petition to their deans in order to take more classes.
Associate Professor Juliet Fuhrman, chair of the Department of Biology, however, feels that the issue of students unknowingly taking on overwhelming workloads has not been significant.
"The students that we see pretty much know what they're getting into," she said
Fuhrman added that advisors to biology and pre-med students do a good job informing students about the workload involved in each class and that a wide variety of non-lab classes are available to non-majors.
"If a non-major student were to take that course, they might underestimate it, but it would be one of many courses they would have for fulfilling their science distribution," she said. "All of our science departments have a large number of offerings that might be better directed for students who are non-majors."
De Klerk found in her conversations with deans at other Boston-area schools that many of them offer additional credit for co-requisite lab classes. She cited Brandeis University as one of the schools that moved from a system resembling Tufts' to one like the system de Klerk was proposing.
Fuhrman said, however, that Tufts' policy was on par with that of its peer institutions. She explained that Tufts awards credit per course instead of other schools' policy of granting credit based on class hours. Lab sections thus do not get credit because they are not a separate course.
"Whereas you spend an extra three hours in the laboratory, that reinforces the rest of the course," she said.
Fuhrman added that comparable work in a humanities course would be a research project or final paper.
Pasternack also raised one possible drawback to adding credit for labs, noting that it could adversely affect a student's transcript. In the foundational Biology 13 course, "Cells and Organisms," lab participation makes up 23 percent of the grade. Adding a separate half credit for the class would increase the weight of the lab grade on the transcript.
Likewise, Fuhrman noted that splitting the course credit could be damaging for the student, leading to a lower grade for the lecture section.
"If a medical admissions committee is looking at a course of organic chemistry and they see the great grade in the lab and the not-so-great grade in the lecture course, I know what's going to catch their eye," she said.
However, freshman Parsa Shahbodaghi, who is taking Biology 13, echoed the senators, noting the extensive work that lab sections require.
"The work people put into [the lab portion of Biology 13], studying for quizzes each week, writing argument papers, writing two lab reports … it's a course unto itself," Shahbodaghi said.
