Overview
Academic Affairs and Academic Senate are partnering on planning for a comprehensive alignment of our course numbering architecture. I thank the Departments and faculty leads, and the members of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and the Graduate Curriculum Committee, who are helping to lay the groundwork for this undertaking at Queens College.
Departments and faculty leads participating in the preliminary work:
- Chemistry and Biochemistry (Jun Choi)
- European Languages and Literatures (Regine Joseph)
- History (Grace Davie)
- Secondary Education and Youth Services (Leslee Grey)
What we are trying to solve
Our course numbering architecture is inconsistent and difficult for students to navigate, particularly prior to major declaration. Different departments use different amounts of digits – three, four, or five digits – to number their courses. There are different conventions regarding dots, dashes, and alpha characters, to indicate things like labs or writing sections. Most of these don’t “read” in Coursedog. And for some reason we don’t use the number “4” at the beginning of any undergraduate course number sequence, despite being a 4-year institution. And it’s not just students who notice. Importantly, external evaluators such as Middle States look for internal consistency in course numbering as part of their expectation for Standard III (Design and Delivery of the Student Experience).
Baseline expectations from the Provost
This is a primarily faculty-driven curricular effort, hence the partnership with Academic Senate. I don’t have any expectations on the details of the outcome. That is up to the faculty and should be broad enough to serve the college for some time into the future.
However, thinking from an institutional and student-facing perspective, I do want this group to ensure the following are addressed:
- Decide on the total number of digits we will use across departments to number courses. I would steer us away from three digits, as some departments with multiple sub-fields will eventually (or have already) run out of real estate.
- Provide a clear, succinct, broad description of what courses beginning with a “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, “5”, “6”, and “7” involve.
- Begin use of the number “4” in the undergraduate series at the beginning of upper-level undergraduate courses, as appropriate.
- Determine a common way to indicate specific course foci (e.g., a writing course, a lab, field course, etc.) that is legible from within Coursedog.
What does this mean for me/my department?
Nothing immediately. The small group listed above will work together and with UCC/GCC, in appropriate consultation with other stakeholders, to develop a Senate resolution for presentation in the Spring of 2026. Beginning in the Summer of 2026 and through Fall 2026 we will need to implement the changes. At an institutional level, we will endeavor to batch the work up as much as possible and coordinate the changes with the Central Office. We will also likely move this through at the Departmental or School level, to not bottleneck the committees. Finally, we recognize that ancillary materials will need to be updated to reflect changes.
Background resources
- A Faculty Senate resolution from the University of Illinois Chicago that provides an example of how another institution has approached this work. Note: many institutions did this work a while ago, so this is from 2001 but provides a solid rationale and example, nonetheless.
- The WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) Fellows, under previous Academic Senate Chair Kevin Ferguson, compiled a landscape scan on course numbering.