Cornerstone’s only two and a half hour class, SCI 100: Foundations of Scientific Inquiry, will no longer be offered after this year’s May term.

With CU’s new core classes now being taught to freshman and transfer students, many of the old core classes are no longer being offered or are in the process of being phased out. SCI 100 is one such class.

Timothy Detwiler, associate provost for traditional programming, said students were informed in the fall of 2007 that SCI 100 would no longer be a core class and students should take the class while they still could.

The course was offered last summer, last semester and this current semester and will be offered May term one more time to give students one last chance to take it, Detwiler said.

Detwiler said the reason SCI 100 is no longer part of the core is because of the core’s shift in focus.

The new core focuses on four major themes: “civitas, which is citizenship, leadership, worldview and information literacy,” Detwiler said. The course that will be taking the place of SCI 100 addresses these themes.

The new course is SCI 311: Science in Culture. Detwiler said the course asks, “How do we as Christians get involved in the various issues of culture?” He said that the course deals with such issues as euthanasia, abortion and the environment.

One difference between the two courses is their grade level. SCI 100 was a freshman level class, while SCI 311 replacing it is a junior level.

Detwiler said this has to do with the new core being linked through all of a CU student’s education. He said freshmen will work on most of their core classes throughout the year, then this will be followed up by a sophomore experience. Students in their junior year will take SCI 311, and then they will conclude with their senior seminar their last year of undergrad.

Placing the course at a junior level will ask students to seriously think about “what it means to be a Christian involved in scientific concepts” and will ask them to think more critically because of the advanced nature of the course, Detwiler said.

Students in the new core will not only have to take SCI 311 to fulfill their science requirement, but they will still need to take a lab science and the prerequisite SCI 213: Quantitative Reasoning.

Jim Fryling, professor of chemistry, said that when CU decided to redo the core, two science courses were chosen to replace SCI 100 because of some problems professors were encountering with the curriculum.

Fryling said that CU was graduating students who could not deal with quantitative information very well.

“While many students know how to get this information, there [is] a significant amount that don’t, and they sometimes just get misdirected by quantitative information. They have a hard time bringing things with numbers into the equation,” Fryling said.

Thus, the idea of SCI 213 is to get students “recognizing the importance of using data in their decisions, evaluating data and then evaluating arguments,” Fryling said.

Fryling also said that the purpose of SCI 100 was to instruct Christians on how to incorporate science into their worldview, evaluate scientific arguments and understand some of the accomplishments of science. This component is picked up in SCI 311.

As far as when these courses will be offered, Fryling said SCI 213 is being offered for the first time this semester. SCI 311 is “pretty much ready to roll” according to Detwiler. However, it will not be offered until the fall 2009 semester because it is not yet needed.