In one course, students watch two hours of professional wrestling each week and read "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pro Wrestling." In another, they learn about "Management Science and the Modern Engineer."

At Penn State, the courses qualify as a one-credit, mandatory first-year seminar.

Faculty Senate passed legislation requiring the seminars in 1997, and that requirement went into effect after the spring of 1999. Since then, many faculty members and students have complained that the seminars have strayed from their original purpose of introducing new students to Penn State and helping them learn about Penn State resources and activities.

Tomorrow, the senate committee on undergraduate education will examine the first-year seminars and consider recommending either refocusing their goals or removing the mandatory requirement.

In the lead-up to the meeting, student groups have been discussing the seminars to decide what to recommend to the senate committee.

The Council of Commonwealth Student Governments (CCSG) passed a resolution Saturday supporting the mandatory requirement but encouraging the senate to refocus the seminars on their original goals.

Jerry Livingston, CCSG president, said there was little control over the first-year seminars. "Depending on which college picked it up, they just really didn't follow through with it too well," he said.

Livingston said while many first-year seminar courses at University Park are integrated with a major, many commonwealth campus courses are independent. He said some independent courses were "more or less a joke."

At Saturday's meeting, multiple representatives said freshmen were unhappy with the current system, but other representatives said good seminar classes were very useful.

Some members proposed eliminating the mandatory requirement, although the final resolution continued to support it.

Livingston said he believed eliminating the mandatory requirement would eventually cause the seminars to fade out.

Ricardo Torres, University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA) academic affairs committee chairman, said he had discussed the issue in Academic Assembly.

"There's a general consensus that [first-year seminars] need to be fixed," he said.

Jay Chamberlin, UPUA president, said he also thought the seminars should be reformed. "I think if they're going to keep them mandatory then they have to make them more useful," he said. "They haven't been the most worthwhile things so far."