Courses proposed for the GenEd curriculum at IU Bloomington should satisfy the following:
- Courses must be fully approved and part of the IU course catalog prior to proposal for General Education. A course need not, however, be offered before it is proposed for GenEd.
- Courses or experiences designed for specific majors, and with extensive prerequisites, and where no substitutions or equivalences exist across the campus, should not be considered appropriate for inclusion in the Common Ground. Courses with more than one prerequisite are ineligible for inclusion in the GenEd curriculum. Courses approved for the Foundations requirements will not count toward the prerequisite limit in other General Education areas.
- With the exception of 300- or 400-level courses taken abroad as part of a study-abroad experience (which may count toward fulfillment of the International Experience option of the World Languages and Cultures requirement), upper-division courses are ineligible for the Common Ground.
- Courses that are taught with S/F grading are not eligible for the GenEd curriculum.
- Foundation courses must be offered every spring and fall semester during the regular academic year.
- Breadth of Inquiry courses and World Cultures courses must be offered at least once every four years.
- Currently there is no rule governing the frequency of world language courses.
- A single 5-cr. course intended to fulfill the entire GenEd requirement for Natural and Mathematical Sciences (5-6 cr.) must include a substantial lab component.
- "Generic" (i.e., variable title) courses are not eligible for the Common Ground unless there is clear evidence that every section offered under the generic course number and title fulfills the relevant rubric and that departments are committed to maintaining this constraint on sections offered in the future. The guiding principle is that all sections offered under the same generic title must satisfy the relevant rubric for inclusion in the General Education Curriculum. If only some of the topics of a particular generic course appear to be good candidates for GenEd, departments have two options. First, they may create a new standalone course for each of the appropriate topics and propose them individually for GenEd. In this case, each individual course proposal will be evaluated separately under the relevant rubric, and all GenEd principles of course eligibility (such as frequency of offering) will apply. Alternatively, since GenEd approval may be granted to individual topics of a variable title course, departments may propose a subset of topics offered under a generic course title for review, presenting relevant materials for each of the classes in this subset. Thus, certain topics of a generic course could carry GenEd credit while other topics of the same course do not.
In consultation with the relevant Common Ground subcommittee, the co-chairs of the General Education Committee may waive requirements governing the eligibility of courses for inclusion in General Education, but only when the requirements in question do not involve judgments about the suitability of the course under the governing rubric.