Changes in the requirements of employers, in the nature of society, and even in fads and trends all influence the design of college curriculum (Shmanske, 2002). Colleges and universities must keep pace with the times or suffer from decreased demand for their services, measurable as declining enrollments. Changing a curriculum to address these concerns is made more complex by the fact that colleges are being challenged to devise curriculum reform efforts that enhance their innate capacity to ensure that students graduating or completing a program possess the general education competencies associated with the program or discipline.
A number of colleges that are somewhat removed from the mainstream of higher education offer distinctive, innovative, or at times experimental curriculum. Bassis (2003) noted that at the majority of colleges and universities in the United States, the rules for structuring undergraduate degree programs tend to be institutionalized. Following the rules means using the Carnegie credit and the grade point average (GPA) to denote the quantity and quality of learning, structuring curriculum to include a major, general education, and free electives, using norm-referenced evaluation or grading on the curve to evaluate the academic performance of students and focusing on discipline-based instruction. However, as Bassis (2003) suggests, innovative schools are ensuring that general education performance on the part of students is improved through a comprehensive institutional change process in which curriculum is focused not on disciplinary based learning, but on curriculum that integrates different content areas, uses a portfolio assessment process, and develops academic contracts for students setting forth measurable performance objectives and learning outcomes.
In the general education sector, college students are required to take what can be called core competency courses in language arts, including ...