The College Academic Council held a town hall meeting with a panel of administrators and professors from Georgetown College on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of changing Georgetown’s standard academic course structure from five three-credit courses per semester to four four-credit courses.

Over 40 students attended the meeting, which included a panel followed by a discussion for students to raise concerns and share their opinions.

Faculty members on the panel included College Dean Chester Gillis, Senior Associate Dean Anne Sullivan, Vice Provost Randy Bass, Government Department Chair Michael Bailey and government professor Andrew Bennett. CAC President Parnia Zahedi (COL ’15) and CAC representative Kennedy Maker (COL ’18) also sat on the panel.

Maker began the meeting by discussing the structure of a Georgetown degree and the implications of restructuring it.

“What really sparked my interest in this whole transition from the 5-3 to the 4-4 was just a little calculation I made out one night,” Maker said. “Basically I just went through and I made a sample four-year plan of someone who’s coming in as a freshman as a government major who wants to be pre-med and has no AP or IB credit or language experience.”

Georgetown University degree requirements mandate that each student earn 120 credits in order to graduate. A student in the College must take a minimum of 38 courses, including core requirements, six additional college-specific requirements and the language requirement.

To highlight the problems with the current course structure, Maker indicated that a government major on the pre-med track would have to take 37 courses and 113 credits, which leaves one course and seven credits available to the student before completing the minimum degree requirements.

According to Maker, the remaining credits do not leave enough room for exploration within other College courses.

“[This was] kind of staggering because I thought ‘Oh wow,’ there’s literally one course of free time and you have seven credits of free time,” Maker said. “So then I did some more research. I looked at peer schools to kind of see what kind of systems they had, and that’s when I really started to notice that Georgetown was more of the exception to the rule rather than the rule itself.”

Several other universities, such as Johns Hopkins University, Washington University in St. Louis and Notre Dame University, have also switched to a 4-4 course structure in order to alleviate students’ academic stress and shift the focus of courses from quantity to the depth of the material.

Afterwards, Maker suggested methods of implementing this new system, including double-counting courses for different requirements, reducing elective requirements and altering core requirements.

As an alternative to a complete restructuring of the College’s standard course structure, Bass proposed a hybrid system of 36 courses that would have a 5-3 course structure when a student begins taking courses required for his or her major. The structure would transition to a 4-4 system later on in order to preserve both breadth and depth.

In addition, Bass introduced the possibility of project-based minors in which some or all of the credits are awarded through projects rather than courses.

“We are trying to look at ways to assign credit to some of the richest experiential learning so it’s credit-bearing for you and load-bearing for faculty,” Bass said.

Zahedi explained that the current 5-3 course structure does not offer equal opportunities to all students.

“One issue surrounding it all that the council discussed … was kind of the equity issue of this all. What if you came in with a lot of AP credit?” Zahedi said. “Someone who doesn’t have that AP exposure in high school and then came in and didn’t have those credits and can really only take their requirements. [They would] never [have] the chance to take that one semester of four courses so they could intern.”

However, several panelists discussed the potential drawbacks of the 4-4 system, including the reduced ability for students to earn more than one major or take additional electives and possible negative effects on less popular departments.

Gillis said that the restructured system may also have negative consequences on a student’s grades.

“There are two consequences you also might think about if you are on a 4-4 versus a 5-3. [In] a 4-4 system, your GPA might be affected more by one class [or] two classes that don’t go as well as it would compared to the [5]-3. It would make a more profound impact up or down,” Gillis said. “And I don’t know what your parent’s reaction would be, say, ‘Am I getting my money’s worth? I’m spending 60-something thousand dollars [for you] to go to Georgetown and you’re only going to four classes.”

Although a straw poll taken at the meeting showed that the majority of attendees supported a change to Georgetown’s degree requirements, students had different reactions to the proposal.

Madeleine Ringwald (COL ’16) said that the 4-4 course structure would have both pedagogical as well as practical benefits, in terms of double-counting course requirements.

“I do think double-counting classes between minors or across majors and minors is a really good way to combat … not having to reduce major requirements drastically,” Ringwald said. “And I also think if a sort of decrease in course requirement or totally eliminating course requirement were accompanied also by a broader consideration of cross-disciplinary learning. … That wouldn’t only benefit professors, that would benefit students.”

Contrarily, Benjamin Lillian (COL ’18) said that the current course structure allows for students to take a larger variety of courses.

“I feel that re-scaling to a 4-4 credit course system would seriously limit our ability as students to get a taste test of a bunch of the huge academic variety of these fields that there are before we choose to specialize in the right one and I feel that that might rush us … into picking something that [we] have not tried,” Lillian said.