<p>I just finished an associate degree. it required 2 hours of PE ( 2 one hour classes). Just loved being the 50+ year old arthritic woman in PE classes with the 18 year olds :rolleyes: . Yoga about killed me. I really wanted to enjoy it. But I really didn’t!</p>
<p>The 4 year school I transferred to to finish my accounting degree does not count the PE classes.</p>
<p>I just want to add…my kid’s orchestra courses were in ADDITION to the courses required for her double majors in bioengineering and biology…not “instead of challenging courses”. She actually LIKED playing in the orchestra, and that was one of her criteria when choosing a college…being able to continue to do so and take instrument lessons.</p>
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<p>This matches my own experience. I realize schools vary on this, but it seems on average, the norm is 4 courses in a US semester system and 5 in a Canadian one. And while I might have taught courses with different total contact hours and credits here and there, the courses are basically the same in both locations. The big difference though being when I’m teaching them my course, my American students always had 3 other such courses and my Canadian ones had 4 other such courses. </p>
<p>Or to take the example with your brother. If I understand correctly (and maybe I am getting it wrong), he received 1 more credit for extra contact hours, but covered the same material. But you had one additional course each semester of 8 semesters before graduating. That is an entire additional year of coursework.</p>
<p>Both of mine attended/attend schools with 3 hour classes, 12-18 hrs. cost the same, 12 was minimun to be considered FT. One was at a Big 10 school, the other a LAC. Neither ever took the minimum, usuall took 6 classes.</p>
<p>I think taking an athletic class can be a great stress reliever. The smae might be said for some arts classes. D’s athletic EC’s have always served as a stress reliever for her.</p>
<p>My daughters school you pay by the credit hour. But it is a state U so not as high tuition and fees as a private school.</p>
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<p>@Starbright: You have it right. It seemed that I was doing 25% more work per semester at McGill than my brother was doing at Boston University. Perhaps the extra 20 minutes of class time per week at BU allowed for more Q&A and discussion time.</p>
<p>Oddly, Boston College (the Jesuit school) operates on the 5x3 pattern like McGill. BC students point that out as a reason why they are getting a more rigorous education compared to BU students!</p>
<p>Depending on school and major… a student may have no “free electives” or a few or many.</p>
<p>I was talking with the instructor for my guitar class, and from the way he seems to describe things, the best way for instructors in “recreational” classes to show there’s actually a demand for those things is to have a formal log showing students have a desire to be involved in an activity. If not enough students sign up for a given type of class, the class gets cut and then the school says there’s not enough funding to pay for a person to be around. If nothing else, I find my guitar class is a great way to relieve stress from working in a lab all week and, when I was still taking classes, a wonderful way to have some other “work” to do other than problem sets every night.</p>
<p>In undergrad I also took a class in racquetball and certainly learned more technique than when I’d just go to the gym and play with a few friends. I actually took the class since I had a three hour hole in my schedule and needed some excuse to stay on campus instead of making the twenty minute walk home.</p>
<p>D. has taking “Paper Making” as the only art class that she could afford time-wise as art classes are very time consuming. It was one of her most time consuming classes and completely unrelated to her major and minor. She had to present her work in art show at college. Why she would not be allowed to take a credit for it? I was praying that she would not lower her GPA by the grade in this class. Thank goodness that she did not! I consider this class non-academic since she did not learn anything related to her major or minor. Also, her minor included singing classes. She had lower grades in those (“A-”) which have lowered her GPA below 4.0. She was singing in duets with music majors, some of them with incredible voices developed thru extensive pre-college training. I was extremely impressed by her pulling “A-” in singing classes and she has developed very nice voice as an unexpected bonus. She was required to take them for her Music Minor. So, those are also should not be counted? So was her credit for her hiking trip in NZ. She has indured the most physical challenge that she has ever experience and she was doing several projects for whole summer to receive a credit for this trip (credit was optional, she did not need it for graduation, but she decided to get it anyway, since tuition for it was covered by Honors scholarship). She has learned so much, she has admitted that she has learned much more about NZ and obtain skills that would not be possible to get in lecture class. </p>
<p>I am not sure about counting/non-counting, some of those non-academics are very challenging for people who take them completely out of their comfort zone.</p>
<p>As others have said, music, dance, art or theater are academic concentrations at many colleges, and study includes history, theory, anthropolog, and composition studies.</p>
<p>I think it is very important for others, who are not majoring in the arts, to have exposure to the actual practice of an art form. Appreciation comes with trying things. Exposure to the arts is an important part of distribution requirements in many schools, and is just generally part of being “educated.”</p>
<p>This is a potent subject for many of us, because, in our state and probably others, there is always the possibility of music or art or drama (or dance, though in high schools dance is the forgotten art; it seems to be valued in Canadian culture more than US-is that right?) being cut as a “frill,” especially in these days of standardized testing and “one size fits all” education. Our town recently had to vote on saving the music and drama programs, and, after an arduous campaign, we actually won.</p>
<p>One of my kids is a dance major and another is majoring in music. Their lives would have been so different without high school exposure to these areas and yes, they got credit for classes in music and art, and yes, they took way more credits than needed to graduate.</p>
<p>The issue of 3 credit courses versus 4 credit courses is interesting. In our area, private colleges/universities tend to grant 4 credits, and public colleges/ universities grant 3. UMass Boston, for instance, has 3 credit courses. This means taking 40 classes to graduate rather than 32, as at Harvard or BU, for instance. Students at UMass Boston tend to be working full-time, and/or raising families, and tend not to have a lot of money, or may be paying themselves, and the extra expense of this difference in number of classes is falling on the wrong crowd, if you ask me. And it is hard enough to graduate with those life encumbrances. Taking a few 3 credit classes/semester means taking forever to graduate. Why not add some time and a little more difficulty to UMass classes and make them 4 credit? There must be a reason, and it probably has to do with more money for the state somehow.</p>
<p>Sorry for the soapbox, but this has bothered me for some time!</p>
<p>Add me to the list. I got 1 credit hour for tap dance! 
It counted toward my PE requirement.</p>
<p>I got an A in the class, but I was one of the few that did. There were “quizzes” based on daily lessons and there was were tests. Part of the tests involved performing a routine taught by the teacher, the other part involved performing a piece I choreographed myself. It wasn’t easy.</p>
<p>Well,
Here is my conclusion from above: we should appreciate interest in art and give credits for it, but going abroad, exploring, engaging in “field” learning of new language / culture/ environment with extreme challenges that might include new language/dialect, extreme physical challenges of hiking, boating,…ice climbing in cruel outdoor conditions and presenting extensive projects / reports about it - forget that. Easy credit? Probably the hardest of them all, definitely much harder than Chemistry. So easy vs difficult is not a criteria. We seem to be tailoring to one taste, and saying “sorry, but NO” to others who appreciate learning outside of their major/minor or exploring arts. There are very many examples of other type of classes that will no please people who are engaged in arts. I love arts myself, taking adult classes, going to museum and concerts.
But I can see that others might be interested in something else and that something else could be completely outside of their major/minor and at the same time could be very valuable and extremely challenging learning experience.</p>
<p>So, where we draw the line?</p>
<p>MiamiDAP, good post.</p>
<p>Something that I think about is why might a class like astronomy or geology be seen as more important, more rigorous, or have more academic value for a general business major than a class in public speaking, or some class in cinema/film, or a class taken in the social sciences (ie: sociology)? Perhaps astronomy and geology are not seen as more important by some, but classes in biology or calculus are viewed as having more academic value for the general business major (most business majors must take a class in calculus).</p>
<p>Reed has a very strict PE requirement of 6 qtrs of credit over three semesters.</p>
<p>It wasn’t an overload situation- & I never worried about D displacing academics with salsa dancing or self-defense.
On the contrary, I think it is a wonderful requirement to get students out of their head.</p>
<p>I don’t know if younger D has a PE requirement, but she has been good about taking yoga/self-defense or hip hop @ school. She also belongs to the bike club & wanted rock climbing shoes for xmas. ( also doesn’t require overload)</p>
<ol>
<li>CREDIT HOURS: Interesting. Back in the day, I had to take 5-6 three hours classes per semester to reach the 128 hours graduation requirement (Jesuit college). My daughter will be expected to do the same at a different Jesuit college next year.</li>
</ol>
<p>I had no idea that wasn’t the norm. Four four-hours classes?? Hmmm.</p>
<ol>
<li>ARTS CLASSES (yeah, even Beginning Ballet): I’m a strong proponent of at least AN arts class among core classes. In addition to the benefits already expressed, students who are exposed to the arts may be motivated to become PATRONS of the arts. All kinds of benefits to that - for both the individual and the struggling arts communities.</li>
</ol>
<p>Back in the Dark Ages, I took Flower Arranging for one of my required fine arts classes. Took it Pass/Fail since getting an A required a notebook (photos of arrangements and an analysis of each) of at least 100 pages. I retain a lot more from that class than the “Survey of Western Art” class the semester before.</p>
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Interesting. Our state Us actually have to follow strict rules about how much classroom time is involved per credit hour. The vast majority of classes are 3 credits as they meet for 3 class periods (or the equivalent time wise if they meet twice a week). A lot of science classes that have labs are 4 because the lab is an additional class period (sometimes more than 1). Some classes may even be 5 - for instance some foreign language classes meet 5 times a week, so they count as 5 credits, I think my daughter had one science class that had 2 labs in addition to 3 classes a week so was 5 hours.</p>
<p>Am I missing something…? There seems to be an assumption that students are taking these “easy courses” instead of more challenging ones. As I mentioned earlier, DD was not taking orchestra INSTEAD of her course requirements for two majors (engineering and biology) but she was taking it in ADDITION to these requirements. </p>
<p>I’m having trouble understanding what folks are concerned about. Where can students take an art course INSTEAD of a course to fulfill the requirements of their major/minor course of study (unless their course of study IS art)? Many students are taking these “other courses” in addition to their regular course load. What is the problem with that?</p>
<p>^People here do not have problem with taking classes, but for some reason they have problem with getting credits for them. I do not see any problem here either. If somebody is paying for additional credits, why not? Better for everybody else. Eventually graduate will apply to some place - Grad. School, job. If you take these classes instead of others that you could have been taking in addition to core requirement, your application will get pitched. Everybody knows that. No, kids are taking all requirements, they are also taking classes that are not required but related to their major/minor. However, most young people would like to explore, try something outside of that, which might not be easy at all and it might not be art either. They are willing to pay money for that, let them have it and get credit for it. I do not think that D’s paper making class, trip to NZ or even her music minor had any effect on her being accepted to Med. Schools. She just took advantage of what was available to satisfy her curiosity. Her memory of her UG years got enriched.</p>
<p>I was going to write a really long post, but luckily for all of you, frazzled2thecore and compmom said everything I had in my brain, and in a more articulate and concise manner than I probably could have managed! My HS senior daughter (who plans to double major in biology and dance) is doing her senior project teaching dance in middle school. Her written project report is all about dance as the forgotten art that has been eliminated (or was never available) in many public schools.</p>
<p>I just wanted to add about those who seem to only have a problem with getting credit for beginning level arts classes: I think this should be handled in the arts similarly to other subject. Back in the cave days when I went to college, if a student needed math or English classes that were considered remedial (not college level), then they received no credit. But in areas such as foreign language, even beginner level classes counted. I think in the arts, decisions can also be fairly made about whether a particular class is actually remedial (no credit given) or is simply a beginning college level class.</p>