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Show Academic Hour System Outlived Usefulness? SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (IP) The credit hour system in American Ame-rican education, which placed American colleges and universities universi-ties in the academic bookkeeping business, has outlived its usefulness, useful-ness, Dean Allan O. Pfnister of Wittenberg University declares. "The credit system is part of our history," Dr. Pfnister explained. ex-plained. "And it has served a good purpose. The question now is whether it has outlived outliv-ed its usefulness. I think that It has." He advocated that more colleges col-leges abandon the system of one and two and three credit units. The work would be accomplished instead in larger blocks of time and the emphasis would be on means of assisting students to achieve a certain level of competency com-petency rather than the number num-ber of hours spent in classrooms listening to lectures or engag-i engag-i n g tightly-controlled discussions. discus-sions. A combination of comprehensive compre-hensive examinations and larger lar-ger blocks of time will lead to a better educational experience experi-ence for both student and teacher, tea-cher, Dr. Pfnister added. Commenting on graduation requirements, re-quirements, Dr. Pfnister stressed stress-ed that as long as we are convinced con-vinced that a college education should provide some depth and some basic core of experience, we will have the problem of determining de-termining what the basic core shall be and how it shall be related re-lated to the total experience of the student. "The crying need among A-merican A-merican colleges," he added, "is for some clearly thought out principles for organizing the core of experiences." |