LSA students who like studying classical violin or other classes outside the college could benefit from recent additions to the LSA academic requirements immediately.

The changes, approved by the LSA faculty last Monday, include an increase in the number of credits a student may take outside the college from 12 to 20. Also, there will be an addition to the distribution requirements subject categories interdisciplinary courses, which will be allowed to count for up to three of 30 distribution credits.

"In practical terms, the change involving the increase from 12 to 20 non-LSA credits takes place immediately, but the change involving the interdisciplinary distribution courses will not take place until next semester at the earliest," said Robert Owen, LSA associate dean.

Interdisciplinary courses need to be identified and labeled before the changes can go into effect. Owen said it takes several weeks for a course to go through the entire approval process.

"A good example of an interdisciplinary course would be a course that discusses something like AIDS, but includes discussion on both the sociology and biology of what is going on, so it falls in more than one category or isn"t clearly in one category or another," said Charles Judge, director of Academic Services at LSA Academic Affairs.

Owen said the interdisciplinary courses will not necessarily be new courses, but courses currently taught that are not counted toward distribution. "For example, the Women"s Studies program offers courses that are combinations of humanities and social sciences, the global change program offers courses that are combinations of social science and natural science, and the life sciences program offers courses that are combinations of humanities and natural science," he added.

Students were less inclined to elect these types of courses because they carried no distribution credit, Owen said.

Ultimately, there will be some courses categorized as interdisciplinary for distribution credit for next fall term, but there is no way to tell exactly how many at this point.

"I expect there will be a gradual build-up of such courses over the next few years, and that many of course approval requests for (interdisciplinary) credit will originate from academic programs that are highly interdisciplinary," Owen said.

The change from 12 to 20 credits allowed from outside LSA was prompted by the college"s desire to allow students more freedom to choose their electives.

"It"s giving students more flexibility," Judge said. "There have always been a few students that wanted to take more credits outside LSA, but probably the majority of students don"t run into any limitations."

Academic minors for LSA students from other schools and colleges may still be years away, Owen said.

"The intent behind the change from 12 to 20 non-LSA credits was not to encourage other schools and colleges to develop academic minors along the lines of LSA minors," Owen said. "Some may choose to do this, but we recognize that others simply can"t because of enrollment pressure from their own students. These "pressured" schools and colleges are in exactly the same situation as some large LSA departments which do not offer academic minors because all of their resources are required to meet the needs of their own students."