UP President Emerlinda R. Roman proposed the creation of a “responsibility center” for UP’s General Education (GE) program at the UP System-Wide GE Conference held October 20 at the NISMED Auditorium at UP Diliman.
The GE program is the hallmark of a student’s undergraduate education in many universities worldwide. UP’s GE program is what gives the “Tatak UP” to its students: “It is the program that sets UP apart from other universities,” Roman said.
She described the proposed office as: “The office or officers shall be responsible not so much for routine activities as advising, overseeing tutoring programs, developing instructional materials, etc. but more for nurturing a culture that supports the GE program, conducting regular reviews of the program and introducing innovations to it, even conducting curricular experiments to enrich the program.”
Roman’s proposal seeks to address the mounting concerns regarding the current GE program’s more than eight years of implementation. These concerns were culled from a review conducted by the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs following a call at the 2009 UP System-Wide Conference held in Subic, Pampanga. The review consisted of focused group discussions among the UPD faculty, students and alumni.
The issues focused on four main concerns, which Dr. Amelia P. Guevara, Vice President for Academic Affairs, elucidated on. These issues were: 1) prescription vs. choice; 2) the proportion of GE courses to major courses; 3) class size; and 4) program administration.
Prescription vs. choice. According to Roman, the shift from prescription to choice “arose from the need to provide students more freedom to decide based on their interests, their own sense of their capacity and worth, and what courses would be useful to them.”
UP’s GE program has undergone a number of review processes and changes. The most recent was in 2001, when the Board of Regents approved the Revitalized General Education Program (RGEP), where major changes were introduced in the program’s framework, content and approach. Foremost among these is “the shift from prescription to choice” which allowed students to choose courses they wanted as long as they complied with the number of courses in domains of Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Philosophy, and Math, Science and Technology.
Roman said this option needs to be reviewed in consideration of the following: 1) students’ performance in the UPCAT subtests, e.g. English and Math; 2) students’ proposed major or specialization, e.g. should a biology major need to take a Biology GE or should an Economics major need to take an Economics GE; and 3) specific courses that all students must take, e.g. a writing course, Math or History.
In the presentation of the review process and results, Guevara showed a table containing the distribution of grades in the GE courses at UPD noting that many were “uno-able,” thus called because they had higher grades.
“The apparent grade inflation might have been the result of the competition for students in an open market that tends to pander to their interest in obtaining higher grades,” Dr. Cyntha Rose Baustista, sociology professor and conference moderator noted.
The top five RGEP courses at UPD for Academic Year 2009-2010 were English, Speech Communication, Kasaysayan, Geography, Philosophy and Biology.
Some participants also commented that a number of UP Diliman summa cum laude—its top honors—have graduated without taking a single Mathematics course.
Synthesizing the discussions, Bautista noted that many units have circumvented the three domains feature through advising and recommending of priority courses. She also noted that “the spirit of the original RGEP was undermined by 1) the limited number of available courses; 2) the demands of professional programs and 3) outcomes of a program whose spirit (and the framework that breathes life into it) was neither imbibed nor followed—outcomes such as students who graduate without learning basic thinking skills.”
Proportion of GE to major courses. The RGEP currently requires students to take 45 units which cpmprise from 22 percent to 35 percent of an undergraduate degree. Roman said the proportion of the GE program relative to the major has actually decreased over the years and now varies by program.
“The size of the GE program may not seem important but this has to be seen in light of the proposed K+12 basic education plan.” Roman said.
The K+12, as proposed by the Department of Education, seeks to add two more years to the current 12-year basic education program in the country. According to an October 5 report at http://newsinfo.inquirer.net, the program “aims to produce employable 18-year-old high school graduates by giving them a longer time to study and master employable skills.”
“While it may be difficult to prescribe an ideal combination, the size of the GE program would have implications on the content and approach in teaching the GE courses, i.e. a small core of GE courses may require that the course be more structured and rigorous and richer in content,” Roman said.
At the conference, it was agreed that about 6-9 units per domain may be required which, Bautista noted, would presumably incorporate remedial courses while the quality of the country’s system of basic education has not improved. However, decisions regarding which courses to require within programs shall be left to campuses and programs, noting several considerations.
These, as enumerated by Bautista, include: the recommendation to bring together cluster groups across campuses for a common discussion on minimum requirements; recommendations based on the experience of the National Institute of Physics of allowing units to tailor the RGEP courses to the students’ disciplinal interests; the suggestion to pilot an initial set of requirements before deciding on the matter; and the proposal at the 2009 Subic conference prescribing across units and campuses a set of books for all UP students and passing an examination anytime, among others.
Class size. “Size is a function of resources and by resources, I do not only mean financial resources. The availability of qualified professors who possess the attributes of a GE teacher is limited so that sometimes, it is better to expose a large class to one outstanding GE professor than to divide the class into smaller sizes and expose them to faculty members who do not have the academic credentials and professional experience to handle those courses,” Roman explained the issue.
The agreement reached at the conference was to let the constituent universities decide on the class size. “However, it may be a good idea to actually undertake a systematic study that compares big classes with break out groups and integrated small classes. At the moment, the pedagogical impact of large classes remains an empirical question,” Bautista summarized.
Program administration. “The administration of the GE program rests with the departments, colleges, the University Council and the campus and System GE Councils,” Roman said. The structure, however, does not have a specific “responsibility center” for the GE program.
“If we consider the GE Program as the hallmark of a UP education, then surely it needs more attention than what it is probably getting today.
Dr. Bautista put the concern in a better perspective, stating that one of the weaknesses of the RGEP administration is the absence of an accountable person or unit “to blame.” “Having a GE czar—who is mandated to fight for the Tatak UP vis-à-vis the interests of major disciplines; to monitor the teaching of GE and initiate interventions and research that would improve it across units and campus….; to review courses regularly with power to delist those that do not hew closely to the objectives of the program; to incorporate good features of past GE programs including relevant elements of the old university college; and to provide both systems of incentives and penalties—seems to be imperative at this juncture,” she concluded.
—Chi A. Ibay