The Lantern Issue 1-26-10

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Tuesday January 26, 2010 year: 130 No. 52 the student voice of

The Ohio State University

www.thelantern.com campus

Class gift announced

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sports

Hoop dreams

thelantern Hithcock evacuation cost more than $130K Thirty employees moved from building after flooding raised health concerns KATHY CUBERT Lantern reporter cubert.1@osu.edu Ohio State has spent $132,319 to move about 30 College of Engineering employees from a building where two workers possibly contracted a serious lung disease last spring. OSU began moving workers from Hitchcock Hall after the two stricken workers retained an attorney. All of the employees are from the college’s Career Services department and are now working in Mason Hall. The women contend they contracted the fungal infection histoplasmosis after OSU workmen installed fans in the ceiling of their office suite in Hitchcock. The fans blew histoplasmosis spores out of the ceiling into the suite and sickened the women, said David Shroyer, an attorney who represents them. “There is no evidence of any problem in that building in terms of those issues,” said President E. Gordon Gee in an interview with the Lantern on Jan. 12. It is “one of the great mysteries” and “an act of God” how the women became ill, he said. The workers were trying to clean the suite after a water line broke and flooded the area March 12. The fans were installed in an attempt to dry out the suite. The university had planned to renovate that part of Hitchcock but decided to begin the work sooner because staffers in the suite were growing increasingly

OLGA STAVRIDIS

ROSEMARY HILL

AMY FRANKLIN

worried about their health. The university will have an estimate of the renovation cost next month, said Amy Murray, assistant director of media relations. College of Engineering administrators met with Hitchcock workers Nov. 3 and the evacuation of the suite began soon after. Administrators met with faculty, staff and students again on Dec. 3. Some employees were offered free chest X-rays to determine if anyone else had suffered lung damage. Rosemary Hill, director of Engineering Career Services, supervised many of

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Former Buckeye Ivan Harris is shooting for a chance to play in the NBA.

thelantern.com

Going door to door for the census

Terry Gustafson has found much of his daily tasks as a professor replaced by his work helping the university transition to semesters in 2012.

Consumed by semester switch RICHARD OVIATT Lantern reporter oviatt.3@osu.edu

sports

Going to a Big Twelve? weather

CHRIS UHLER / Lantern photographer

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When Terry Gustafson joined the Ohio State faculty as an assistant professor in 1979, it’s doubtful he would have been able to predict what he’d be doing today. While Gustafson is still a professor of chemistry at OSU, and now the executive associate dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences, his primary responsibilities lie elsewhere. Gustafson co-convenes a committee whose responsibility is to oversee curriculum changes during the university’s move to semesters in 2012. Just how much time does he devote to issues regarding the semester switch? “An ever-increasing amount,” he said with a laugh. “My role within Arts and Sciences is shifting more to just being related to the semester conversion. It may get to 100 percent by summer.” The committee on curriculum is one of seven sub-committees formed to oversee the transition to semesters. Their responsibility is to provide each department with information to format their courses to be approved as semester-length. “I’m sure when you’ve gone to look for courses every term, you see this lengthy list,” he said. “Well, all of those are currently designed for quarters.”

“Now what [the departments] have to do is say, ‘These are the courses we currently offer our students so they can be the best graduates they can be. How do we structure our program under semesters to accomplish that same process?’“ Every course will have to go under a review process and be approved by the Council on Academic Affairs before it can be offered in the semester system in 2012 — which means that each department must have their proposals submitted to the council long before that time. “It turns out that the curriculum needs to be in place by autumn 2011,” Gustafon says. “That’s coming up real fast.” This means that the review process must start well before that. The target is to have submitted all the reformatted courses by this time next year. The College of Engineering is slated to be the first department reviewed by the council this spring. But Arts and Sciences will be the big challenge for Gustafson and the rest of the committee, as it encompasses approximately half the student body. “I think all of us just want to do a time-warp to autumn 2012 and say, ‘Yes, it’s done!’ But there’s a lot of work to be done between now and then,” he says.

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Exams can save students thousands, but few take advantage

mostly cloudy

MICHAEL TOBIN Lantern reporter tobin.61@osu.edu

WE 37/27 partly cloudy TH 41/36 showers FR 40/37 mostly cloudy SA 48/42 cloudy www.weather.com

Ohio State undergraduates can save time and money by testing out of courses through the Credit by Examinations Program. There are around 200 courses from more than 40 departments which a student can test out of. But few students use it or even know about it. The program isn’t used enough, said Brian Endicott, the manager of the Office of Testing. “We only see between 75 and 100 students per quarter,” Endicott said.

“And we see 40 to 50 of them the first week of classes.” Students can earn up to 45 credit hours of examination credit, the equivalent to a rank at OSU. While the credit counts toward graduation, it does not affect a student’s grade point average. Still, a student can save a year’s worth of sitting through courses through this process. They can also save a lot of money. Exams cost $50 each — much cheaper than the cost of taking the course. It would cost a student $450 to take nine tests, worth 45 credit hours. It would take at least two full-time quarters to earn the same amount

of credit — at a cost of $2,893 per quarter for in-state students and $4,524 for out-of-state students. But no one has earned 45 credits through examinations yet. “I wish I knew this when I was in undergrad,” said Jake Mayer, a master’s of education student at OSU. And Endicott says the program has its risks, because students cannot take any given exam more than once. “If you failed, you blew $50,” he said. “It is one shot, one shot only.” He said the basis of the program is to provide for “students who have the knowledge without sitting through the course.” Exams are formatted to mirror

the final exam of the course and are mostly multiple choice questions. There are also fill-in-the-blank and essay questions, depending on the course. Passing scores vary based on the department. Recommended study material, usually a textbook, is shown online for most exams. “Many students study over winter and summer breaks,” Endicott said. “They get the textbook and prep over break.” Exams are set up by calling the Office of Testing and scheduling a

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