University Council has approved additional combinations to Trinity’s new joint-honours system – which is set to replace the TSM structure for next year’s freshers – Provost Patrick Prendergast announced on Twitter this afternoon.
Council’s approval means that students can now take Law, Political Science, Computer Science, Business, Linguistics or Social Policy as part of their combination.
As part of the new joint-honours arts programme, subjects will now be organised into four “pillars”, with all subjects in the same pillar being arranged in the same weekly slots on students’ timetables – limiting the number of subject combinations due to timetable clashes.
In the tweet, the Provost congratulated the Senior Lecturer Kevin Mitchell and “all who have enabled this new wave of creativity” for their work in creating the new joint-honours combinations.
The Provost said that the joint-honours combinations consist of “any two subjects in different pillars”.
In an email statement to The University Times, however, Mitchell clarified that “in practice we are offering a subset of all the possible combinations”.
Mitchell also said that a benefit of the joint-honours system – specifically the pillar system and block timetabling – is that it “enables new subjects or combinations to be added with no disruption to existing combinations”.
Linguistics and Social Policy are subjects which have previously been incorporated as elements in other courses but have now been approved as separate joint-honours subjects.
The majority of current TSM combinations will continue into the new joint-honours system, but a number of TSM combinations will be removed.
The joint-honours system was introduced as part of the Trinity Education Project (TEP) – a massive overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum. The reforms aimed to diversify the range of assessment for students, with a decrease in the number of exams students sit.
