Behind the ACTA General Education Report

The Amer­i­can Coun­cil of Trustees and Alumni released a report yes­ter­day giv­ing UNM a C grade for gen­eral edu­ca­tion require­ments – along with New Mex­ico State Uni­ver­sity and nearly a third of the col­leges reviewed. With more than 60 per­cent of col­leges in the report receiv­ing a C or less, the cri­te­ria used war­rant a closer look.

The grades are based on how well a college’s core cur­ricu­lum aligns with the seven areas selected for the report: com­po­si­tion, lit­er­a­ture, for­eign lan­guage, U.S. gov­ern­ment or his­tory, eco­nom­ics, math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence. The report gives UNM credit for only three – math, sci­ence and for­eign language.

UNM does include a fourth require­ment from ACTA’s list – two semes­ters of com­po­si­tion. The report states: “No credit given for Com­po­si­tion because stu­dents may test out of the Uni­ver­sity Writ­ing require­ment and ful­fill the Writ­ing and Speak­ing core require­ment with a course in pub­lic speaking.”

Test­ing out of Eng­lish 101 and 102 at UNM requires noth­ing less than near per­fect scores on the ACT or SAT or a per­fect score on AP exams – 29 or higher for ACT Eng­lish, 650 or higher for SAT Crit­i­cal Read­ing, or 5 for the Eng­lish Lan­guage or Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture AP. Surely stu­dents with those scores may be safely assumed to have mas­tered basic composition?

In addi­tion to pub­lic speak­ing, advanced stu­dents can ful­fill this core require­ment with expos­i­tory writ­ing (a.k.a. advanced com­po­si­tion), tech­ni­cal and pro­fes­sional writ­ing, or rea­son and crit­i­cal think­ing (a phi­los­o­phy course). The com­mon thread in these courses – includ­ing pub­lic speak­ing – is that all teach stu­dents to com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively and eth­i­cally and to crit­i­cally ana­lyze the mes­sages they read, hear and see.

UNM doesn’t expressly require the remain­ing three areas – lit­er­a­ture, eco­nom­ics and U.S. gov­ern­ment or his­tory – though intro­duc­tory courses in those areas are options among human­i­ties and social sci­ences requirements.

Of course, most peo­ple would prob­a­bly agree that UNM’s core cur­ricu­lum could be improved. A task force of fac­ulty, staff and stu­dents has worked over the past year to develop rec­om­men­da­tions for a revised core focused on learn­ing out­comes and to iden­tify a struc­ture to ensure con­tin­ual review of the core. Look for more details on UNM Today later this semester.