Class cancelled for some summer intersession courses

Courses within the College of Arts and Sciences no longer will be offered during May and August intersession, which could affect students’ degree plans.

At the end of the 2012 spring semester, Renee Williams, director of intersession, said Paul Bell, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, notified the intersession office that he no longer would be approving proposals for May and August intersession courses within the College of Arts and Sciences.

Courses from Arts and Sciences have made up about 63 percent of intersession course offerings in the past, Williams said.

“Most of the Arts and Sciences classes taught in intersession do not carry [general education] credit,” Bell said.

However, according to oZone, six Arts and Sciences courses gave general education credit out of 25 intersession courses offered in May 2012. In August 2012, seven Arts and Sciences courses carried general education credit out of 38 total courses offered.

ROTC students’ graduation dates could be affected

ROTC cadet Adam Thamel has encountered barriers to meeting his degree plan because of the changes to the university’s intersession programs.

Thamel, a human relations junior, said as a freshman member of ROTC, he was required to make and sign a schedule of all the classes he would take before graduating.

Thamel said he risks losing his ROTC scholarship if he does not take classes according to the graduation plan he made.

“If they decide that you’re not going to graduate on time or in the manner that you said you were going to, you can get in big trouble for that,” he said.

In addition to losing his scholarship, Thamel faces other risks if he graduates late: Because his commissioning date and Basic Officer Leadership Camp will be pushed back, graduating late can affect his assessments and whether he even gets commissioned.

“They could say, ‘Well, you’re taking too long,’” he said. “They could say, ‘You don’t have to pay any of the scholarship back, but you don’t get commissioned.’”

Courses canceled for revenue reasons

When courses are offered through intersession, the instructors are paid through the intersession office, not through the college, Williams said.

The colleges do not make revenue from intersession courses, but colleges do make revenue from summer session courses, Bell said.

Like fall and spring semester tuition, half of summer session tuition goes to the university and half goes to the college, which pays the costs of the course, Bell said.

“With the budget cuts that we’ve had because of the state Legislature and the cutting of funds in higher education, we had to find ways to raise extra money to help keep all the classes going, and so whatever money we make here , we plow back into fall and spring,” Bell said. “We had some Arts and Sciences folks who were teaching in intersession because they always did.

“And the problem was, we found we were competing with ourselves.”

According to the 2013 summer schedule, intersession courses now run at the same time as the summer session.

Many times, the same courses were offered in intersession and in summer session, based on professorial decisions about teaching classes, Bell said.

“We decided that we would stop competing and basically run all of our summer activities through the university’s summer session,” Bell said.

Bell said the current summer session was designed so students can plan around their summer engagements.

The summer session, which Bell said was expanded by the university in 2010, consists of five blocks: three four-week blocks and two “half-semester” blocks which split the summer.

“If there’s something we need to do to create a block [in summer session] that accommodates ROTC students, that’s great,” Bell said.

Demand for intersession courses still high

Arts and Sciences faculty interested in offering intersession courses have been calling the intersession office, Williams said.

“The student interest is still there,” Williams said regarding May and August intersession. “We get phone calls daily from students wanting to take additional courses that aren’t being offered.”

Thamel said many other students could be affected by the changes as well.

“There’s 30-year-old students with kids, there’s commuter students, there’s scholarship-restricted students, there’s students that have time requirements for their graduation,” Thamel said.

Sarah Smith

Sarah is a former staff member of The Oklahoma Daily who worked as Campus Reporter.