Culminating Experience in the Major

Each department and program includes among its major requirements a culminating activity, normally during the senior year, academically challenging and appropriate to the discipline and mission of the department or program. To this end, the following principles apply:

1. The requirement may involve individual projects (theses, directed research and writing, laboratory research, creative projects), senior seminar(s), group tutorials or colloquia, or some combination of these. If the requirement exclusively involves graded individual projects, a department or program may provide, on a regular basis, an informal but mandatory senior colloquium or set of group tutorials (these would not necessarily need to be graded.) Their goal is to encourage students to exchange ideas, and to share with one another and with members of the faculty reports about progress with their individual projects.
2. The requirement will assume a solid grounding in the substance of the discipline and expect and encourage development of a relatively sophisticated understanding and use of its methods, thereby fostering the student’s ability to articulate his or her work and ideas in writing, oral presentation, and/or discussion.
3. The requirement must be taken for credit and graded. All majors must satisfactorily complete this requirement.
4. The requirement must involve at least one course credit but may take the form of a single project extended over two or three terms (e.g. a 3-term tutorial, laboratory, creative or research/writing project) with credit and grade recorded upon completion of the final term of the project.
5. Departments/programs may offer more than one sort of senior academic activity in order to maintain rational teaching loads for faculty while providing appropriate options to be elected by or designated for students on the basis of their interests and academic achievements.

The implementation of this requirement for each individual major is described under the department or program section in this Catalog.