Orientation to the campus should be secondary to what students need to master the academic demands of the university. While we acknowledge that the implementation of First Year Seminars is in the right direction, requiring at least one small section which meets for two hours each week in that first semester on campus, we also know that instructors are sorely constrained in their ability to focus on deeper learning when class sizes are large. We know that dollars are not directly tied to enrollments. Instructors across the disciplines should design assignments which build on this model and provide appropriate feedback to students about their performance. Accordingly, we question the split of lecture and lab in both Physics and Chemistry.
Few students take the lecture-lab sequence together.
While these splits may have some value to administrators for scheduling purposes, they have proven very problematic for instructors. Students new to the University should be expected to learn this material and have opportunities to get relevant feedback through their course assignments. When class size gets large and when students are treated as customers, there is an inevitable drift toward what is straightforward, objective and, too often, easier. Much of the learning that takes place in higher education is inherently complex and difficult. Dumbing down course expectations is the wrong response.