Students studying single-honours or joint-honours courses will from this June be able to either drop a subject or take one up at the end of both first and second year, under the almost-implemented Trinity Education Project (TEP).
The move, which will allow students to change between single and joint-honours courses, comes as part of an attempt to give students more flexibility when they’re structuring their degrees, according to the College’s senior lecturer.
A new online enrolment system is to be phased in this year for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) students on Trinity’s new, more streamlined timetable – which currently only applies to first years – with future plans to expand it across faculties.
In an interview with the The University Times this week, Senior Lecturer Kevin Mitchell said that “there’s a choice point at the end of first year and at the end of second year, and what that means is that effectively we decoupled the entry point or mechanism that students come in on from the exit route”.
“What we’ve done is added a lot of flexibility of pathways, so students can now choose when they go into second year. For example, they started out doing single honours they can pick up a new minor subject. [If] they started out doing joint honours, they can drop a subject”, Mitchell said. “So it’s not necessarily the case that if you came in at joint honours you’re definitely going to get a joint honours award.”
The new system will be in place this June for students who have reached the end of their first year. The choice points will apply to single-honours courses and joint-honours courses – which are replacing TSM on a phased basis, beginning with current first years – as well as common entry courses like BESS and PPES.
Students will also be able to register for elective modules through the online platform.
The “common architecture pathway”, Mitchell said, was facilitated by the phasing out of TSM, which allowed students to pick from a total of 183 combinations of two subjects. Now, students must pick two subjects from five pillars, without choosing two from the same pillar.
“The timetable should be more fixed from year to year”, he said. “It used to be the case that if a student came in in one year choosing to do, say, Italian and music – some other year maybe no student would have chosen that – we have to rejig a lot of the timetable around that.”
“The system now says we have subjects in pillars … that means we can fix the timetable sooner from year to year. We don’t have to react to student choice, which means we can offer things like online module enrolment.”
Mitchell continued: “In the first instance it’ll just be for the subjects within that common architecture – mainly the arts, humanities and social sciences. And in the first instance it’ll just be for second year as well. But then, as we roll out the system across the subsequent years, we’ll expand that capacity and ultimately the goal is to build that for everybody in the college – for all years, for all programmes.”
