Academic units and their use

Title

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XIX (No. 12) December 1967

Year

1967

Subject

University & college administration

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

■ The credit system has been taken for granted as a standard measurement of the amount of learning a student receives in Philippine colleges; but this is an erroneous idea and it is nowhere used in other parts of the world outside of the U.S.A. ACADEMIC UNITS AND THEIR USE In its efforts to see some variety in the offerings of our private colleges and univer sities, the Bureau of Private Schools permits the use of a curriculum by a college pro vided it is substantially as good as or better in some ways than what it generally prescribes. In his work entitled Ex cellence, John W. Gardner the present Secretary of Health, Education, and Wel fare , of the United States, emphasizes the need for di versity in education in or der that schools and colleges may be able to meet the enormous differences of hu man capacities and levels of preparedness and attitudes of young people. From the depth of his knowledge and experience, he strongly urges every educational institution to play a distinctive role in the pursuit of its own pro gram and to win for itself honor and recognition. It should be the policy of the Bureau to encourage respon sible institutions managed by competent educators and ad ministrators to construct and adopt the curriculum of their choice as long as it is care fully and intelligently plan ned. In determining how much a student has learned about a course the measurement is the total number of units he has earned. The academic unit, how ever, is but a mechanical and convenient indication of the length of time spent in a classroom for a subject. In our system in this country one unit is equivalent to 18 hours of class meetings in one semester. It is not a measure ment of the degree of knowl edge a student has acquired or of the mental development he has attained. It serves as December 1967 43 a measure of the number of class meetings set aside for a subject in a semester or a term. It does not even indi cate the actual amount of time a student devotes per sonally to the study of the subject. A serious student may spend three or more hours of study outside the classroom for a subject which is given only a one-unit weight; while another student taking a 3-unit subject might give no more than one or two hours of study out of his own time. The number of units taken by students is thus far from being a measurement of his knowledge of a subject. For instance, manv if not most students finish 24 units of Spanish in our colleges (in cluding the U.P.) without knowing how to speak or write the' language tolerably. The unit or credit system is an American invention. It is not used in British, Euro pean, and other institutions of learning where examinations and the ability to pass them successfully are the test adopted in measuring a stu dent’s knowledge of the sub ject. The fact is that for sometime now, outstanding American educators and col leges have ceased to give im portance to credits or units as measures of a student’s learning. In our own country Government Board and Bar examinations must be passed by a person who desires to practice a profession and to secure an employment in the civil service. This shows that in the last analysis we do not rely on units earned but on the successful passing of an examination to determine one’s knowledge of a subject. The units we now use, otherwise known as Carnegie units, have become the basis of the credit system. It was first adopted merely as a mechanical and convenient way of appraising the formal work of a student at the time when electives became the fashion in the curricula of American schools. The proli feration of electives created a difficult problem for deter mining college entrance re quirements for graduates from different secondary schools. Gradually a system of uniform number and kind of subjects and uniform weights for each of the re quired subjects had to be adopted; and the most conve nient and easy method was 44 Panorama to use a quantitative rather than a qualitative standard. This was found to be the number of hours of class ses sions for each required sub ject in a year or in a semester. The system has been intro duced into the college classes and in graduate courses. A competent American pro fessor, Kenneth E. Eble, in his work entitled “The Profane Comedy” says of this system: “The credit system is one of the large academic sins. Upon it depends the dull student whose A’s in tether ball and leadership offset E’s in reading and numbers... A scholarly investigation of the growth of the credit sys tem appeared in the AAUP Bulletin (Winter, 1955).” Then he goes on to say the following: “The writer Diet rich' Gerhard, traced its be ginnings to public demands for a more varied list of courses and more practical courses in both high schools and colleges in the 1870’s and 1880’s... The tart critics of American higher education, like Thorstein Veblen and Ab bott Lowell (President of Harvard), were even harsher in their criticisms of forty years ago. Veblen, writing before 1918 against the sys tem of academic grading and credit, called attention to ‘the pervasive way in which it resistlessly bends more and more of current instruction to its mechanical tests and pro gressively sterilizes all person al initiative and ambition that comes within its sweep.’ Its acceptance today does not change the fact that only an educational system grown large and impersonal and re mote from learning would tolerate it. Like all bureau cratic growths, it remains be cause, like weeds in hard soil, it cannot be pulled out without destroying the plants around it.” The well-known American writer, Martin Mayer, in his famous work entitled “The Schools” makes the following comments on the Carnegie Unit System: “Alone among the world’s schools the Amer ican high school builds its curriculum on prefabricated identical blopks called Carne gie units. By this system, every ‘course’ meets the same number of hours every week and yields one ‘credit point,’ whatever the subject studied. Nowhere else in the world are all the subjects of study December 1967 45 given equal weight or equal time.” The use of units, which was originally confined to high schools in the United States but which was later adopted in its colleges and then blind ly imitated in the Philippines, is being recognized for some time now as a meaningless way of evaluating a student’s educational achievement. In the work entitled Improving Transition from Schools to College, the report of Arthur E. Traxler and Agatha Town send contains the following critical remarks and explan ation of the Carnegie Unit System: “Secondary schools and colleges need to work co operatively toward the substi tution of. more meaningful statements of accomplishment for the clock-hour kind of evaluation represented by the Carnegie Unit. Historically, the Carnegie Unit served a useful purpose in secondary education and contributed to the transfer of secondary school graduates to college by bringing order and system out of a chaotic college en trance situation. Also, the unit method of reporting is so thoroughly embedded in thinking and practice that it cannot abruptly be dropped. But the Carnegie Unit is out dated by modern techniques of evaluation, and the com mittee reaffirms the position expressed in the Fourth Re port to the effect that the Carnegie Unit should be abandoned as rapidly as other procedures for measuring secondary school work — measurement of fundamental educational objectives, for example — can be evolved and brought into practice.” Finally, the following lengthy quotation from the paper of President Dietrich Gerhard of Washington Uni versity on “The Emergence of the Credit System in Amer ican Education” gives us the critical views of famous edu cational leaders and should deserve our serious attention: “Undoubtedly the best in terpretation of the system stems from Abbott L. Lowell and from Norman Foerster. Foerster, in his book on The American State University (1937), talks of ‘purchasing a diploma on the installment plan,’ and he adds: ‘Once a credit was earned, it was as safe as anything in the world. It would be deposited and indelibly recorded in the 46 Panorama registrar’s savings bank, while the substance of the course could be, if one wished, hap pily . forgotten.’ Lowell, Eliot’s successor at Harvard, spent a great deal of his presidency on undoing the havoc wrought on the college by Eliot’s system of indiscri minate electives. The pro gram of distribution and con centration, soon more or less to be adopted by most other American universities, work ed at least as a partial cure for the credit disease — with as much and as little success as these reforms of the curri culum can have in institutions which cannot cut loose from business accounting in edu cation. You can follow his endeavors in his reports from 1909 on, in his collection of essays with the characteristic title.i ‘At War with Academic Traditions in America,’ in cluding the succinct state ment, in his report of 1917: ‘One of the most serious evils of American education in school and college is count ing by courses — the habit of regarding the school or college as an educational sav ings bank where credits are deposited to make up the balance required for gradua tion, or for admission to more advanced study.’ “Let me, finally, give you a quotation from the work of a professional educator, once more from George Counts’ The American Road to Cul ture (1930): Tn both the secondary and higher schools, the entire curriculum is or ganized into relatively mi nute units of work. Although efforts are always made to insure the pursuit on the part of the student of certain sequences and of a unified program, the result is all too often a mere collection of points and credits. More over, as the student remains in the institution from semes ter to semester, his successes and failures in accumulating these precious credits are meticulously recorded even to fractions of percentages in some office or bureau. After he has acquired the appro priate number of such dispa rate units, with but little provision for the integration of his knowledge, he receives either his certificate of gra duation from high school or his college degree. Even the granting of their highest aca demic honor, the degree of doctor of philosophy, has December 1967 47 been reduced in certain of the large universities almost to a matter of meeting routine requirements. “Having been a student ad viser for more than a dozen years, I can certainly testify to the truth of such criticism. And even if I had not been under the obligation through half of these conferences with advisees to render the serv ices of an adding machine, the impressions would have come unwanted to me — if in no other/way, then in such recent experiences as a gra duate student’s retort to my question: ‘Did it ever occur to you that you could read a book not for credit?’ ‘It is not the custom in this cen tury, Dr. Gerhard.’ I shall always regard it as a jnost gratifying proof of the edu cational success of the His tory Department at Washing ton University that at one time two of our students were informed that they had ful filled all the requirements for the degree without having realized it. This happened in the beginning of 1950 — they were G.I.’s. I am afraid that the story is not likely to repeat itself.” (American As sociation of University Pro fessors Bulletin, Vol. 41, No. 4.) 48 Panorama

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