OPINION
TROUBLE IN SHU-VILLE By Connolly Ferraro
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HUs. Love them, hate them, or (most likely) hardly think about them. But for many Tufts students, SHUs have taken on the lurking appearance of a roadblock to graduation. The SHU system at Tufts is not functioning as it should and can be a significant educational and emotional stressor. The metric that Tufts uses to assign SHUs to classes frequently undervalues the time requirement for elective courses, creating a situation where to graduate on time, students in some majors must take upwards of five classes per semester, enroll in 6 TUFTS OBSERVER NOVEMBER 8, 2021
unnecessary seminar or capstone courses, or take summer classes. These options simply might not be on the table for students with internships, non-accredited extracurriculars, or those who need to work to support themselves or their family. In 2018, Tufts transitioned from a one credit per course valuation to a qualified system where each class is weighted differently and “instruction time and homework time are taken into account.” According to the Tufts administration, the change was made to bring the university
more in line with national standards of credit accounting, to simplify the application process to graduate schools for Tufts undergraduates, and to make it easier to understand the time commitment for each class. Tufts defines one SHU as “one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week”. Under the old credit system, Tufts School of Arts and Sciences students were required to complete 34 courses over the course of eight semesters in order to
