Students with an admit term prior to Fall 2021 (4218) are to be exempted from the First Year Seminar (FYS) general-education requirement if their requirement term changes such that FYS would be added to their general-education requirements.
This policy was presented to the Senate General Education Committee by the Co-Directors of General Education during the Fall 2023 semester and approved by Senate General Education Committee.
A few points of note:
- The motivation for this policy is to avoid the need for students, who started before we implemented an FYS requirement, to submit exemption petitions for FYS upon, as examples, changing majors or being readmitted
- The need for this policy will be relatively short-term, as it only applies to students who started before the general-education revisions that initiated a required FYS were implemented in Fall 2021; the number of students for whom this may be applicable will decrease with time
- Without this policy we expect to receive an increasing number of exemption petitions related to this over the next year or so that will then tail off
- In cases for which a student would still benefit from taking an FYS, it is hoped that that would be recommended by the student’s advisor, and we’d prefer to rely upon such advisement rather than (try to ) structure this policy to automatically make such determinations. That is, we want the policy itself to be easy to understand and implement for most anticipated situations – it is not meant to discourage students who’d benefit from an FYS from taking one.