The College of Arts and Sciences is going back to the basics. Next year, the CAS Writing Program will offer mandatory yearlong writing and literature seminars for freshmen. These classes will replace current English courses such as EN101, 102, 104 and 201. As opposed to students being able to place out of English courses with SAT scores or AP credit, incoming students will take the newly created BU Writing Assessment test, or BUWA, during Summer Orientation to determine placement. The program also offers sections for students who would require a slower pace to accelerate them to the level of the peers.
In addition to these changes, the school will also offer an enhanced writing center that has the potential to be able to give valuable academic support. This supplementary resource would effectively compliment the seminar.
The university wants to provide a more uniform writing course to ensure that all students are learning the same material that would start them out on equal footing when they enter more challenging upper-level courses. In the past, CAS has lacked such a writing program that would meet this need — but now, it seems that the school has succeeded.
The program would benefit all students because it would help foster practical skills that would help them in all their other college courses. The seminar is supposed to build on the foundation that students probably learned in high school and further enhance their writing abilities and communication skills. Based on the CAS Core Curriculum’s basic philosophy, the college wants students to develop critical thinking skills from reading and analyzing literature. Because writing is so important for all students to master to be successful, learning this skill early in their college careers would prepare them for many of other courses.
Writing and critical thinking skills are not only important in college but also in the workplace. In creating this new program, the college wants to prepare students for the demands they should expect from their employers because administrators realize that lacking these transferable skills would make students less competitive compared to their counterparts in the workforce. Honing these skills in college is essential to increase their desirability to future employers.
The CAS Writing Program seems to have created a system that will help students get the most out of their first college writing class experience.
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