Re: 1 or 2 semesters of FYE?

["James C. McDonald" <jcm5337@usl.edu>]

If your school is dealing at all with accountability issues regarding
student abilities to write, or if it has a writing proficiency exam or a
portfolio system to assess students' ability to write as they progress
toward their degrees--or if something like this is on the horizon--then
your school needs to address how reducing the first-year composition
requirement would affect that. At the very least, your school needs to
consider how such a change might affect retention and graduate rates as
well as students' preparations for careers and graduate school.

If you're looking at what other schools do with the first-year writing
requirement, look at the whole picture, at what those schools are doing
with writing instruction after freshman year. Some schools have
sacrificed one first-year required writing course in order to add
writing course requirements at the sophomore, junior, or senior level.
Others may have dropped the requirement but encouraged students to
enroll in elective writing courses, figuring, among other things, that
students learn more when they are motivated to take a writing course.
The research is pretty strong showing that students who do little
writing after their first year regress in their writing abilities.

It sounds as if your school wants to weaken its commitment to writing
instruction rather than carefully reconsider whether its campuswide
writing instruction is serving its students well.

Jim McDonald
"I'm goin' back to Dallas, Texas, just to see if anything could be worse
than losin' you." --Austin Lounge Lizards