Written by David Lapakko\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Two requirements for the major that no longer exist<\/b><\/p>\n As some of our seniors look forward to commencement, there are at least two things they won\u2019t need to worry about.\u00a0 If you were a communication studies major in the \u201890s, two final hurdles stood in your way.\u00a0 The first involved a requirement for all majors that was in place for roughly ten years: all communication studies graduates needed to participate in at least two interscholastic speech tournaments in order to graduate.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that in the \u201890s, we sent a lot of students to Normandale Community College to compete in Twin Cities Forensics League tournaments that were held at Normandale six times a year.\u00a0 After a while, the requirement became a bit of a hassle for some students and a record-keeping headache for the department, and so it was dropped.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The other requirement was built on the premise that all of our majors should not only be able to speak–they should be able to write, or at least know correct usage, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.\u00a0 And so, a \u201cwriting test\u201d was administered to every graduating senior; it was basically a fake news article that was riddled with errors in composition.\u00a0 If a senior could find and correct a good percentage of those errors, they were free to graduate; if not, they needed to get some sort of remediation until they could pass.\u00a0 After many years of such a requirement, a few rather vocal students complained that the test was too silly and superficial, and it was abandoned.\u00a0 But I still have scores of old completed writing tests in my office drawer!<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In those two respects, completing the major is slightly less of a hassle than it was in the past.\u00a0 For that matter, so is completing the entire bachelor\u2019s degree.\u00a0 If you were a student in 1990, you\u2019d need to pass 35 courses (three of which were J-term courses) and your commencement would be in late May; now you only need to pass 32 courses, and we\u2019re now basically done by the end of April–and let\u2019s face it, that makes the month of May just a whole lot less stressful.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 9) Written by David Lapakko\u00a0 Two requirements for the major that no longer …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,13,2,8,12,88],"tags":[114,65,113],"class_list":["post-25670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-communication-studies","category-faculty","category-film","category-new-media","category-students","tag-campus-history","tag-david-lapakko","tag-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25703,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25670\/revisions\/25703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}