To address student and faculty concerns, The Committee on Undergraduate Education has organized a subcommittee to look into possible changes regarding the first-year seminar (FYS) curriculum.

The changes would entail leveling the course loads of various seminars to create more uniformity in the FYS requirement.

All Penn State students must take one FYS course during their freshman year to graduate.

Committee Chair Art Miller said the committee will meet Tuesday morning before the University Faculty Senate meeting in Harrisburg to discuss and debate the FYS requirement. The subcommittee will then take the information and form a report by the end of this semester.

"From talking to students ... there's a whole range of opinions about first-year seminar courses," Senate Chair Kim Steiner said. "I would hazard to guess that we hear more complaints than plaudits about the first-year seminar requirement."

Steiner said a task force within the Senate, created in February 2003 to review the FYS requirement, issued its report last March.

Task force Chair Janis Jacobs, vice provost for undergraduate education and international programs, said the report was given to the Senate for review and recommendation. She added that the task force found a "huge variation" in students' opinions about the FYS requirement.

According to the report, only 28 percent of students who took a one-credit seminar and 49 percent of students who took a three-credit seminar said they experienced the highest level of satisfaction with their FYS course.

Andrew Lau, a task force member and College of Engineering FYS coordinator, said the group used information that had already been gathered to make recommendations for improvement.

Lau said the task force used surveys from the Undergraduate Student Government and different academic colleges regarding FYS satisfaction, and talked to students and coordinators as well.

He said the task force then made recommendations to the Senate, such as making the FYS courses more uniform in terms of workload and expectations.

"That's what we hear about seminars, that some of them range just from showing up to much more rigorous than that," he said. "From a sense of fairness and equity, it would be nice if there would be some guidelines that could deal with that."

Lau added that the College of Engineering, which offers about 70 FYS courses, has created a Web site with detailed descriptions to allow students to make informed choices about which one to take.

He said it might be beneficial for other academic colleges to also list their seminars in this manner.

Javier Falla (sophomore-industrial engineering) said he was disappointed with his history seminar.

"I didn't like it at all," he said, adding that he arbitrarily enrolled in the seminar to fulfill the requirement.

However, Molly Correll (junior-civil engineering) said she enjoyed her seminar in mathematics.

"It was an easy course ... an easy A," she said. "I liked it a lot, and I liked the teacher."

But Correll said some of her peers did not have positive experiences because of the number of projects and journal entries they had to do.

"They said it was too much work for one credit," she said.