The Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Academic Assembly this week demonstrated its real purpose in the university community.

At its meeting Monday, the assembly gave recommendations for the university reevaluate the current structure of the First-Year Seminar program.

Many of the assembly's suggestions were strong. The legislation called for more uniformity among seminars in each college, and the inclusion of information on more university-wide resources.

First-year seminars should consist of a more practical curriculum, one that both provides knowledge of the basics of Penn State and teaches students about valuable academic skills and lesser-known university resources. There should be more uniformity in the classes within each college to ensure each student has a valuable, worthwhile experience. Professors have been doing their own thing in these classes for years, and it is time to examine those ideas and determine what works best. Most of the assembly's recommendations will help accomplish that.

However, one suggestion the assembly made was to increase the maximum number of students in each section from 20 to 25 people because of a lack of faculty. While an extra five students is not unmanageable, the change defeats the original purpose of the seminars -- to introduce students to the college atmosphere and transition them from high school in a smaller, more personal setting -- and more than that would certainly ruin the seminar atmosphere. Members said the increase was necessary because there are currently too few professors available to teach every section. But the legislation also recommends that those teaching the class be highly qualified or tenured faculty members. But if there truly is a shortage of professors who can teach the classes, it makes little sense, then, to require that seminar instructors be high-ranking faculty members.

This could be the ideal way to use undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants who have been on campus for a while and can help students with the basics, while freeing faculty members to teach higher-level or larger lecture classes. While the class-size increase would be unfortunate, it is important to note that most of the assembly's ideas are examples of exactly why the body exists in the first place -- to help make the learning environment the strongest it can be for students. Hopefully, when the Faculty Senate and Penn State President Graham Spanier consider the recommendations, they will keep in mind that they have been made by the students who have experienced the classes firsthand.

After all, Penn State is supposed to be a student-centered university.