> When Barbara says Calgary's introducing a 3 year BGS degree, I > think: "How many 'courses' (or credit hours, or semesters, or > whatever units we use to measure it) is that?" In some ways, STU has > had a sort of unofficial 3-year option because our degree is defined > as 20 "courses" (or 120 "credit hours," translating a full-year course > into 6 credit hours), and I've seen a number of customers (oops) buy > their degree (double oops) in three years, by taking all the > intersession and summer session courses they could cram in. I take > it that's not what the BGS is? Good point, Russ. When we talk about a "4 year degree" here at Calgary we are using shorthand for "20 full courses which could normally be completed in four years by a traditional student taking the default path of 5 FCE per year." Many take five or six years to do this and I suppose that some could take it in 3 with cramming, summer courses etc. You're right, that's not what the BGS is. The BGS is a fifteen-course (rather than twenty-course) degree with no major field--a truly interdisciplinary (or grab-bag, depending on whether you like the formula or not) degree intended for people who either want education for education's sake (we hope that there are still some around) or a shortened route to further studies. Interestingly, students opposed the degree, presumably because they were afraid it would somehow cheapen the degrees that they were working an extra year to get. I have not quite fathomed the psychology of this. Science is seriously planning a 3-year degree as well. We just had a faculty retreat to work out the possibility of making our other majors in GNST into three-year degrees. (Thus, majors such as Communications Studies, Women's Studies etc could be had in three years, as well and the more generalist BGS, affectionately known as the Bugs degree.) It foundered on a variety of problems. Some though that it would be just plain too thin academically. I used to think this but have come around to a certain extent to the idea that you can't get a lot with a first degree anyway so why not move the process along a little faster. My problem was more internal-structural: we would have had to eliminate the "preprogram" first year in which students get to play with a variety of options before deciding on a miajor. We would also have had to offer a lot more of our courses in the first year where we would not have control over enrollment numbers, creating the possibility of our nice little intimate faculty being swamped with students without the resources to teach them. The short answer, Aviva, is that Alberta has not offered 3-year degrees until now but is haltingly and soul-searchingly beginning to. Doug