Indiana University’s General Education Redesign Committee has worked hard to revise the GenEd requirements that affect undergraduates’ choice of courses.
The committee’s task was to design requirements that 1) apply to all students across schools and majors, 2) satisfy the Indiana Commission for Higher Education’s standards for transferability and 3) to the extent possible, make GenEd requirements at IU’s Bloomington campus consistent with other IU campuses to help students transition between campuses.
At the town hall on GenEd on April 1, Interim Provost John Ciociari eloquently stated GenEds should prepare students, regardless of major, for their future careers and to be good citizens. The objectives listed above are admirable but do nothing to further the provost’s goals.
The great hockey player Wayne Gretzky said the key to his success was that he knew where the puck was going. Our version of the puck is a world where AI will play an important, if not dominant role. Everything I read says critical thinking is the most important skill for the future.
Seventeen months ago, I sent the GenEd committee an idea for a critical thinking requirement and never heard back. On April 1, I submitted a tentative syllabus for a critical thinking course to the provost and the committee’s chair. It is easy to give a pretest to estimate critical thinking ability before a course and a posttest after a course to measure achievement of learning objectives.
Another suggestion I made at the town hall was that M125, pre-calculus mathematics, and M127, pre-calculus with trigonometry, should not count for the new mathematical reasoning requirement. These courses cover topics like synthetic division, asymptotes, analytic geometry (props to René Descartes!) and trigonometry. These courses offer no skills that will aid non-STEM majors in their future careers.
I sent the provost and committee chair a draft syllabus for a course entitled “Quantitative Reasoning for Everyday Life.” Students would 1) interpret graphs and encounter charts and data visualizations; 2) distinguish between mean, median and other summary statistics; 3) learn about probability and risk in real-world situations; 4) evaluate claims based on data in news and social media; 5) make informed financial decisions involving interest, loans and investments; 6) identify misleading or incorrect quantitative arguments.
This type of course would equip students across majors with skills for their future careers and role as informed citizens much better than M125 and M127. Sample questions that a student would be able to answer after the course would include:
- If a 40-year-old woman has a positive mammogram, what is the chance she has breast cancer?
- If 45% of men and 35% of women are accepted into grad school at IU, does that indicate women were discriminated against?
- In golf, is it true that you “drive for show and putt for dough?”
- Why do football teams now go for it more on fourth down?
- Is the American worker better off now than 40 years ago?
- Why did polls underestimate support for Trump in 2016 and 2024?
- Are data centers a good idea?
- What is the difference in the monthly payment on a $400,000 house for a 20-year loan compared to a 30-year loan?
- Was the 1969 Draft Lottery that sent people to die in Vietnam fair?
- How does evidence-based medicine work?
If you want to see my syllabi for these courses (aided by CHATGPT!), email me at winston@iu.edu.
Wayne Winston is Professor Emeritus of Decision Sciences in the Kelley School of Business and proud husband of former Indiana University Trustee Vivian Winston who was fired by Governor Mike Braun via UPS Express mail.
