Although many students have never heard of oversubscription and most will never have to deal with it at all, some students are very familiar with the policy, which is designed to prevent students from taking too many classes in one department.
The policy dictates that of the total 32.00 credits that are required for graduation, a student can count no more than 14.00 courses taken in a single department. Among those 14.00 credits, no more than 12.00 credits may be numbered 201 or higher, and no more than 4.00 credits may be numbered 101 to 200. Cross-listed classes count for oversubscription in every department in which it is listed, regardless of the cross listing chosen by the student.
“I found out my sophomore year, after taking a ridiculous amount of music classes, that there’s this word ‘oversubscription,’” said Kim Lippman ’06, a music major. “I was taking six music classes in one semester, and I would have liked it had my advisor said, ‘Kim, this is a bad idea.’”
“I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be a theater major, and since that was where my main interests lay, I took a lot of theatre classes as a freshman and sophomore,” said Anna Moench ’06. “By the time it came to declare my major, I had a good portion of it completed already, and I ended up being oversubscribed by my first semester of senior year.” Moench also wished she was made aware of the policy earlier.
“I knew nothing of oversubscription until I was a junior,” she said. “My advisors should have been helping me plan for that from the beginning, rather than letting me hear about it from a senior who was scrambling to get enough credits his senior year. Oversubscription should be one of the first things you learn about when starting to plan your time at Wesleyan.”
According to Dean of the Class of 2006 David Phillips, information about the oversubscription policy is readily available on the Major Declaration website. Students can track their credits on their personal credit analyses, which are posted in their electronic portfolios.
“The funny thing about awareness is that you can give students a lot of notices, but it’s not until you have a problem that you start paying attention,” he said. “That’s true of anything in life in general. Oversubscription as a concept seems so abstract and far away.”
Phillips added that even students who do oversubscribe in a department rarely run into problems with graduation.
“As long as you have enough useable credits, oversubscription is not a problem,” he said.
Due to their inherently wide definition, many interdisciplinary programs are exempt from oversubscription, including American Studies, African American Studies, Archeological Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Medieval Studies, Women’s Studies, Russian and European Studies, and Science in Society.
Performance majors, such as music and theatre, are especially likely to oversubscribe due to the amount of credits acquired through performances.
“The thing that’s difficult about the theatre major is that two credits of the major are production credits, one for working a faculty show as a tech person, and one for working in some artistic capacity,” Moench said. “I’ve heard that music majors have a similar difficulty, and I think it would make sense if the oversubscription limit was expanded for departments in which production or performance credits are required.”
According to Chair of the Music Department Professor Sumarsam, students in the major tend to oversubscribe because they are taking private lessons and performing in musical ensembles, which count for credit.
“We are not going to prevent [students] from advancing their musical skill just because it will [cause them to oversubscribe],” he said. “If you only take lessons for one semester, you don’t get anywhere.”
Phillips stressed that the regulation is designed to broaden students’ horizons.
“We’re a liberal arts school, not a conservatory, and liberal by definition means broad,” he said. “We just want students to get as broad an education as possible.”
Her frustrations aside, Fields agrees with the reasoning behind the policy.
“I’m not against oversubscription, even thought it’s annoying that it’s senior year and I’m taking two classes outside my major, when I’d rather be taking one from my major that I haven’t taken, sound design,” she said. “But it’s good to know different things. You don’t want people who can play music but can’t spell.”
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