Students have widely disputed Syracuse University’s new proposed class scheduling paradigm since its introduction. Now the Student Association has stepped into the fray with a plan of its own.

The SA Assembly voted to support one of the two alternate plans drafted by President Andrew Thomson on Monday. Thomson designed the plans to deal with a number of complaints voiced at last Thursday’s open forum, including the number of classes on Friday and classes that meet back-to-back on Wednesday and Thursday.

Thomson’s plan is built on the framework of the original paradigm proposal but reverses the schedules for Wednesday and Friday. Under Thomson’s schedule, the majority of 80-minute, twice-weekly classes return to time slots on Tuesday and Thursday. Classes that meet for 55 minutes three times a week are scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Classes end at 1:40 p.m. on Friday, setting aside the afternoon for campus community time, the time period set aside on Wednesday afternoon in the original plan to allow for club meetings and university-scheduled speakers.

Thomson hopes the new SA plan will give the University Senate another option to consider when it votes on the matter at its next meeting. The SA will hold back on formally introducing the plan to students until the results have come back from a student survey being conducted by Undergraduates for a Better Education. Once those results are in, Thomson may send an e-mail to students containing both SA’s plan and another copy of the original, since many students haven’t visited the university’s Web site detailing the paradigm.

‘Student just aren’t clicking on the information the university has been sending them,’ Thomson said.

The introduction of his plan followed a wave of criticism of the original paradigm from SA members. Dominick Chillemi, a senior management and policy studies major, was one of the most vocal in attacking the plan, saying it was a temporary fix to the serious problems of limited faculty members and classroom space.

‘This is a Band-Aid over a bullet wound,’ Chillemi said. ‘We have too many students, too few faculty and too little space.’

Parliamentarian Andrew Lederman, a sophomore international relations major, criticized the paradigm’s increase of Friday classes, saying that it was not likely to stop students from partying on Thursday night, a point with which Chillemi agreed.

‘The rationale is silly,’ Chillemi said. ‘Students are going to do what they’re going to do.’

Published on September 15, 2003 at 12:00 pm