Teaching Core Letter-Designated Courses

Core courses are intended to meet specific objectives that are relevant to students' general educational needs, but which may go beyond the typical interests of any particular academic department, program, or faculty member. It is therefore important for both the faculty member and the student in a Core course to keep in mind both the general goals of the Core curriculum at USM and the specific goals of the type of Core course in question. This is important so that the faculty member can insure that the countless decisions of detail that must occur in running a course will be kept consistent with the Core goals. It is also pedagogically valuable for the student to have the Core goals in mind as she/he does the course.

General Criteria

Letter-designated courses should generally be introductory courses that have (where this is practicable) no prerequisites. These courses should be aimed at a broad audience of non-majors and serve to acquaint students with the approach, major insights and methods of the relevant discipline. Core letter-designated courses should not be survey courses of the sort that might be required of beginning majors unless they can be shown to otherwise meet the criteria enumerated above. In certain circumstances the Core Curriculum Committee (CCC) has made exceptions to the policy against prerequisites.

Category-specific Criteria

For a departmental course to be included in the Core Curriculum it must meet the criteria for one or more of the course categories listed below. Click on a letter designator to see the criteria for that category.

Further information on Writing-Intensive courses can be found at www.usm.maine.edu/wac.

Category Title	Letter Designator
College Writing	C
Quantitative Decision Making	D
Skills of Analysis	E
Performance-Centered Arts and History-Centered Arts	F/G
Humanities	H
Other Times/Other Cultures	I
Social Sciences	J
Natural Sciences	K
Writing	W