Making course numbers mean something

Or what happened when I spent an afternoon reviewing all of the classes in my department….

The perfect pre-Christmas nerdy project: if I could reorganize all of our classes with different numbers, how would I do it? And why do it in the first place?

The answer to the latter question actually comes from something I wondered: why does a student take MSCM 3318 before MSCM 3311? Or MSCM 3352 before MSCM 3351?

I was thinking about this from the perspective of a first-generation college student — and it didn’t make sense to me. So I’m guessing that it doesn’t make sense to others as well. The question then became: what’s a better way of doing things, and can a system be created without being too complicated? So that’s what I set out to do….

For curriculum committee members, and other department chairs, this can actually be a really good exercise. It taught me several things:

• How do we sequence our curriculum? It’s one thing to put it together in a four-year plan, but it’s another to see it in catalog/course description lists.
• Are there parts of the curriculum where we don’t have enough courses or too many courses?
• What really counts as a prerequisite? How do we determine what should/shouldn’t be a prerequisite?
• Are there courses we have that we can encourage students outside the department to take?
• Are there courses that we can encourage students within the department to take that could add additional audiences? For example, we have a course called Critical Analysis of the Media (MSCM 3372) that could appeal to our Rhetoric majors. Similarly, in Rhetoric, we offer Organizational Communication (RHET 3210) that Mass Communication majors could find interesting.

One other reason for doing this is that we could be heading down the road of renaming all of our courses as Communication (COMM) instead of MSCM or RHET. If that happens, we’ll likely need new numbers. But even if we don’t do that, it’s still a helpful exercise to see how things fit together, and where we could create courses that span the department.

The rhetorician and numbers-loving geek in me also finds this important. After all, everyone who’s been to college can guess what Psychology 100 is going to be about. But how do we decide after that what numbers to use? At some schools, Psychology 100 is really Psychology 001, with 100 denoting the cross-over class that could count for graduate or undergraduate credit ^[1] See University of Iowa as an example. At other universities, that cross-over class is a 400-level or a 500-level course. For purposes of this part of the post, I’m using the following definitions:

• 100-level: First year student. No or few prerequisites assumed.
• 200-level: Second year or advanced first-year student. Possibly requires a prerequisite or two (for example, a general education course).
• 300-level: Third or fourth-year student. Some expectation of advanced writing, advanced research, or higher-level thinking. Most courses in the major fall here. Typically, there’s at least one introductory course taken in the department before this type of course, but transfer students may be placed here.
• 400-level: Fourth-year or possibly graduate student. High expectations in terms of writing and of good work in past courses in the discipline. Often the capstone or senior seminar is offered at this level.
• 600-level: Graduate level courses, typically for 1st or 2nd year graduate courses, but not exclusively.
• 700-level: Advanced graduate courses, most often at the doctoral level.

In my discipline, making these distinctions is non-trivial. Interpersonal Communication is offered at many different levels (100, 200, 300, 400, 600, 700). Seeing the number for the course already gives me an idea of how a particular department views the course. I don’t typically need to read the course description if I know the school’s numbering conventions because I already have a sense of how a 100-level course differs from a 300-level course. In a similar way, I know that most Rhetorical Criticism courses are going to be at the 300 or 400 level, and seeing a 200-level course means that some expectations are going to be different (i.e., smaller, more frequent, less in-depth papers). I know that to be true because I’ve taught the 200-level and the 600-level version. And there’s a definite difference in how I approach those courses!

The tricky part is when one school offers a course at the 200-level and my department offers the course at the 300-level, or vice versa. Then it’s time to pull out the syllabus and start looking through assignments….