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As to changing unit counts, you'd have to deal with a lot of consequences, such as required number of units to graduate, unit caps, class standing. How do you propose to change all of those?
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<p>One way to do it is to simply reduce the number of units you earn from 'gut' courses. It's simply ridiculous to me that American Studies actually counts for MORE units than does, say, Chemical Engineering 154 (the capstone senior ChemE lab). That's completely and utterly ridiculous. Just the number of of hours of formal classtime alone should tell you that that calculation is way off base - as ChemE 154 has 9 hours of weekly formal class time (1 hour of lecture, 8 hours of lab every week), whereas AmSt 10 has 4 hours of weekly time (3 hours lecture, 1 hour discussion). And that of course says nothing about the difference in class prep work that you have to do on your own time. The upshot is that you probably have to spend several times the amount of time working on ChemE 154 than on AmSt 10. So why should AmSt 10 actually be worth * more * units? </p>
<p>That's why I am saying that we need truth in units . The number of units that a class is worth should actually be a reasonable reflection of the amount of time an average student would need to do the work for that class. A 4 unit class should require more work than a 3 unit class. Otherwise, the former class shouldn't be worth 4 units. The point is, we shouldn't have these wild fluctuations in course workload.</p>