Which is more valuable, your time or your skills? This question lies at the crux of a debate that many universities and colleges engage in. Classes at most major institutions are based on the concept of credit hours: a weight of the value of the class in terms of the time spent in it. At some institutions, students even pay by the credit hour rather than for each term. But the concept of value by the clock, which has long dominated higher education, may finally be fading — a development that, in recognizing learning as fundamentally skills-based, could nemefit college students.
The concept itself was introduced in 1893, when Harvard President Charles Eliot established the credit hour as a basic education unit. The major benefit of the measure is that it normalizes class values for transfer students, helping new schools interpret students’ records, and helping graduate schools and employers compare various applicants’ records.
Not all colleges use the credit-hour system for its original purpose. In some instances, credit hours are an artificial designation designed to indicate the difficulty of the class rather than the time spent there. And at Brown, credit hours are an even vaguer concept. Yes, students might spend much more time in a class with a lab or a section than they would in a class with neither of those, but that distinction usually doesn’t make an impact on the credit received for the class. The major exception to this is Brown’s language classes, where most classes are single-credit — and some are zero credits — despite the fact that most language classes require more hours than other Brown classes.
Brown might not really be based on credit hours, but it is still based on course credits. Other institutions, such as University of Wisconsin, have done away with this altogether. Their innovative Flexible Option allows students to self-pace their degrees and to earn them through online testing.
Nonetheless, conventional educational establishments continue to focus on time as the underlying signifier of learning. But it isn’t just universities and colleges. The government is entrenched in this system as well. To receive Title IV aid such as Pell grants and federal loans, a student must have a certain number of credits each semester, measured generally in credit hours.
But even the government has begun to consider creative alternatives to the credit hour. Last March, the Department of Education put out a call for colleges to design courses that abandon the concept of credit hours in favor of a new emphasis on skill-based learning and testing. The new regulations recognize forms of direct assessment as an alternative to hours. Direct assessment options include the 5 P’s: projects, papers, presentations, performances and portfolios.
These two systems, one relying on credit hours and the other based on competency, can seem like two sides of the same coin or as creating only a superficial distinction in measurement. But if the purpose of credit hours is to equalize certain classes and education, the competency-based system could accomplish that better. The primary difference between classes at different institutions isn’t just the amount of time but more significantly the things students learn. If there is a way to present that learning in terms of specific skill sets, employers or administrators at post-transfer schools can have a better understanding of what the student actually knows. In a way, this is what grades are for, but grades just tell you how well the material was learned, not what it was.
The competency system has the additional benefit of flexibility. If students only have to sit through a certain number of hours of class instead of learning a specific skill at a flexible pace, they might be less motivated to work hard. At a more flexible pace, students can spread out or condense their work to fit their own needs and schedules.
For now, there might not be a seamless way of integrating these systems into modern education. Even the Flexible Option is mostly targeted at individuals finishing their degrees and those who won’t be on campus — not the kind of education Brown normally focuses on. Additionally, the system relies on the availability of truly effective testing and evaluation, and the perennial complaints about standardized testing — to say nothing of the more subjective testing used in most courses — should remind us that this is not an easy task. Nevertheless, the system is on the rise and could offer undergraduates significant benefits.
Lauren Sukin ’16 is a sophomore concentrating in political science and literary arts.
ADVERTISEMENT
