Before It’s Too Late: The General Elective Syndrome
Quite a long time ago, when I wrote about the Technical Elective Syndrome and I promised that I would write about the other side of the coin in the place where I work/teach (and literally live). However, it slipped my mind for a while and finally, here we go.
The topic is on General Electives - none technical courses offered to Engineering students at our faculty. When we were students not so long ago, we never had a change to follow such courses. I am talking about courses like music, cinema and television, political issues in Sri Lanka, economics and management, etc. They were first brought into the scene with the introduction of the so-called “course-unit” system or the “semester” system.
At the time of introduction, the general elective courses were put into three baskets and the students were asked to choose 15 credits from the three (with the condition of choosing a minimum of two credits from each basket). Fifteen credits is considerably a large portion of their courses: for comparison, the total amount of credits one has to complete to claim for his/her degree is 150 credits and therefore this is 10% of their total workload of four years.
All looks good and it was expected to be really useful and nice. I quote the following from the student guide to give you an idea of what is expected: “General elective courses are designed to enable the students to gain a broader perspective of their roles as professionals as well as citizens in our pluralistic society…”.
However, here is the catch and the cause of this article: although, you need to pass the 15 credits to complete your degree, the grades you get for these courses are not counted towards your merit/class/GPA. Therefore, the students do not feel the need to obtain good grades for these courses, as they are not counted towards their merits. It is typical to see that a student getting good grades for his/her technical courses would have pass grades (typically C grades, which are equivalent to 50%) for these courses. It is also believe that these courses are not considered seriously by the administration and therefore lack of support (timetabling, releasing grades, etc.) for these courses. To add to this, these courses are mostly taught by part-time visiting teachers.
Although these courses were introduced with genuine and useful motives, my feeling is that they are not achieved here to a satisfactory level.
I should add that there is a recent faculty moment to “reduce” the general electives as much as possible and introduce courses to cover similar objectives among the rest of the courses (core/technical electives). However, it is obvious, some of the content that are covered in these courses will not be able to covered in core/technical electives due to the very nature of these courses – remember broader perspective – outside Engineering….