A university task force met on Thursday to discuss the possibility of standardizing first-year seminars.

The Task Force to Review the First-Year Seminar Requirement will be compiling a report to present to the University Faculty Senate.

Penn State began requiring all freshmen to take the seminars in 1999 to introduce students to the content of a specific major and college or to introduce them to student resources, such as the library.

These goals are commendable, but since 1999, it has become unclear if these goals are being achieved in a uniform or meaningful way.

Task force member Andy Lau said there has been "some grumbling" about the varied expectations of the seminars. Academic Assembly members Colleen Stimpson and Melissa Ciurlino both used the term "waste of time" to describe first-year seminars.

The concept of first-year seminars is not a bad one. But since their creation in 1999, the university has not taken proper measures to ensure the standardization of these courses. If in 1999 the university decided these courses were a vital part of students' education, why then did it not specify how
the seminars should be conducted?

Currently, each college decides its own standards for freshmen seminars. This has meant that seminars from different colleges bare little resemblance to each other. It also means there is no university-wide, cohesive plan for these seminars.

Hopefully, the task force will be able to create such a plan.

If these seminars are going to be helpful to freshmen, beyond simply fulfilling a degree requirement, then they must be at least partially standardized. If they are not, students are left with only a certain college or professor's interpretation of the university's goals, which may or may not be what the university intended when it created this requirement.

The process that the task force began on Thursday is an important one and should be completed quickly to ensure freshmen are getting as much out of their seminars as possible.