THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
THE AMHERST
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VOLUME CXLVIII, ISSUE 17 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20, 2019
AMHERSTSTUDENT.COM
College Placed on Lockdown Following Reports of Armed Person Natalie De Rosa ’21 Managing News Editor Editor’s Note: This article mentions suicide. Resources for any person who is feeling depressed, troubled or suicidal are listed at the end of this article.
Photo courtesy of Matai Curzon ‘22
The college recently approved a policy that allows for an additional half-course credit in lab science courses. The chemistry and biology departments will begin implementing this policy in the next school year.
Science Labs to Count as Half Courses Ryan Yu ’22 Managing News Editor Starting in the 2019-2020 school year, a new academic policy will grant an additional half-course credit in lab science courses. Currently, only the biology and chemistry departments plan on using the policy for the next year. This policy was first approved by a faculty-wide vote in May 2018 and is intended to help better represent the additional workload and class hours that lab courses often demand. The courses using the halfcourse lab policy will be largely introductory, consisting of major-track 100-level courses
in both biology and chemistry — CHEM 151/155, CHEM 161, BIOL 181 and BIOL 191 — as well as the organic chemistry track — CHEM 221 and CHEM 231. Students can combine two half-course lab sections to form a full course towards graduation, lowering the number of full courses they are required to take by a maximum of two. The policy will not be applied retroactively. According to Professor of Economics Adam Honig, who helped draft the initial proposal for the policy, this system is beneficial in both “reward[ing] students for the extra time spent
in class,” considering the relative length of lab courses, and giving struggling students a method of recourse. “Inevitably, a course that meets three hours a week and has a substantive lab of another three hours a week has its [requirements],” said Anthony Bishop, professor of chemistry and chair of the chemistry department. “For those students who are feeling swamped by their lab science courses, this builds in the possibility for flexibility.” The college will only implement the policy to a limited set of courses to maintain balance across the curriculum; Bishop
noted that the hope is to reduce student workload but not overemphasize science courses. “A reason we didn’t make the upper-level courses one-and-ahalf courses, even though they certainly have as much workload, is that we didn’t want to proliferate the percent of the GPA that comes from the chemistry courses or, more generally, lab [science] courses,” said Bishop. “It was sort of an unintended consequence of this new policy, and we wanted to mitigate that effect.” “We think it’s those students that are hitting the intro courses
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The college was placed on lockdown on Wednesday, March 13 amid a police search in the woods south of campus for a potentially suicidal person with a firearm. An AC Alert sent at 9:12 p.m. notified the college community to remain sheltered inside of a locked building; the shelter-in-place lifted shortly past 11 p.m. The search began after the person involved called the Amherst Police Department (APD) indicating that they intended to harm themself. The call sparked a joint search with the Amherst College Police Department (ACPD), APD and Massachusetts State Police to track down the individual. In an email sent to the community, ACPD confirmed that the person involved had no known affiliation with the college. The Town of Amherst has not authorized the release of any other information regarding the incident, according to the email. Several local news outlets have reported that the person involved died from an apparent self-inflicted gun wound by the time authorities
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