After nearly two years of tentative planning, the University may add a bachelor of science degree in biology next fall.
Last month, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Committee on Educational Policy and the Curriculum recommended the proposal to the entire body.
If approved at the March 29 Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting, the degree would coexist with the Bachelor of arts degree now offered in biology.
The new degree would be "comparable in academic rigor in science to the two other B.S. degrees, one in physics and one in chemistry," said Committee Chairman Donald Ramirez.
The bachelor of arts degree - which will remain relatively unaltered for next semester - is mainly for students who plan to work in disciplines related to biology, such as education, public policy, law and others, said Biology Department Chairman Raymond Keller.
These students are "not necessarily going to need the calculus and physics that a professional biologist would need in his background," Keller said.
The bachelor of science degree is geared toward students who aspire to be professional biologists or simply want a more in-depth study of biology, he said.
The proposed degree is more structured than the B.A. degree because it emphasizes a progression from the core courses to upper-level courses.
Specifically, students seeking this degree would have to take three core courses plus 24 additional hours of courses at the 300 level or above. The core courses consist of a cellular and molecular biology course, a genetics and evolution course and an integrated biology course covering the topics of genomics and developmental biology.
B.A. students, on the other hand, are required to take only the first two core courses and 15 additional hours of courses at the 300 level or above.
"I sense that it is going to be very good for a large segment of our students," said Robert Grainger, biology professor and Faculty Senate chairman-elect. "There are a lot of universities that have a B.S. in biology."
The project to add a new degree started with a survey of B.S. degrees around the country, Keller said.
But "the overall difficulty and number of hours required were modeled around the physics and chemistry departments here" at the University, he said.
The Biology Department Undergraduate Committee, which Keller chairs, also took input from the Biology Society - a group of undergraduate students - when developing the course requirements.
Early in the process, "we were working pretty closely with the" Biology Society, Keller said. "There was never any uncertainty about whether the students wanted the bachelor of science."
The new degree might also give students more options in the post-college job market. Some pharmaceutical and other companies require a B.S. degree, he said.
"There is a perception by students and perceptions by employers that a B.S. is more rigorous than a B.A.," he added. "Students were sensing that their B.A. was not being treated of equal weight as the B.S."
Some students are excited at the possibilities the new degree would bring.
"I think overall there's an agreement that it's a really good thing," said Catherine Cowan, a third-year College student and president of the Biology Society. "I'm someone who is interested in research. [The B.S. degree] is something that would have been really good for me."
If the Faculty of Arts and Sciences approves the new degree later this month, it could be included in the next issue of the College's Undergraduate Record, meaning students can enroll in the new degree in the fall.
In the meantime, however, the biology department is making as many arrangements as possible, including working on a way to allow current biology majors to pursue the B.S. degree program.
"We're working on transitions so many of our existing majors would graduate with the B.S," Keller said. But "we don't know what proportion of our current majors would like to have a B.S. degree and therefore we don't know what kinds of extra strains the B.S. degree would put on the department."
Pre-medical students probably would have an easier time earning a bachelor of science in biology, he said. "Pre-med students do a lot of what is required for the B.S. degree anyway. They are just going to glide in, essentially. The only change for them would be to take a few more bio courses at the end."
Either way, students pursuing both degree options are treated equally by the biology department - "it doesn't matter whether it's B.A. or B.S.," he added.
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