The Forum

I first encountered the concept of performance courses when my academic advisor told me that a class I was taking wouldn’t count towards my degree, despite it being on a list of courses that supposedly would. Performance courses, as I would eventually learn, are a category of the Humanities and Fine Arts discipline, and comprise a little over 50% of the field’s entire general education curriculum, including all photography, creative writing, theater, drawing, and sculpture classes. However, despite these classes being some of the most popular in the field—and some of my favorite—there is a hard limit of three credit hours from these classes that can be applied to general education requirements, or roughly one average class’ worth. This fact, and my own frustrations, led me to investigate this performance course rule, and who, exactly, made it.

In the Administration building of the Florissant Valley campus, I had asked my academic advisor why my class, a 2024 fall semester creative writing course that was taught at the Meramec campus, was located under the “Courses Not Counting Towards Program” section of my degree audit, when I expected it to be located under “General Education (CORE 42) Requirements”. I had assumed this was a mistake, some error in Ellucian Degree Works, the degree audit software used by STLCC, so, I scheduled the appointment with her for clarification—or maybe reassurance—that the class was, in fact, counting towards my degree as I thought it was.

She turned to her computer’s bright, white screen to find my degree audit as I sat in a chair on the other side of the large wooden desk in her office. My advisor examined her screen and confirmed that what I had told her was true: the class was squarely positioned in a section of the webpage that indicated that I was spending time and money on something that provided me no credits in return. I told her that I had checked that the class was included in the list of classes eligible for my degree’s Humanities and Fine Arts Requirement, which she confirmed. The program itself listed the class as an option to fulfill the credit requirement, so why was it now telling me that it wasn’t? My advisor couldn’t explain it.

I had to wait as she left her office, and me alone, to find someone who could rationalize the anomaly. As I waited, I could hear a confused conversation permeate the small hallways of the administration building’s academic advising offices. My advisor returned a few minutes later. 

She showed me her screen, and pointed out a small section of blue, underlined text. There, clear and legible, the screen read “There is a limit of three (3) credit hours of Performance courses [that] can be applied to the Humanities and Fine Arts Knowledge area and to the total CORE 42.” I had already completed my non-specific electives requirement, which didn’t have a similar cap on performance credits, and already had three credits from exactly one performance course dedicated to my general education block, so there was nowhere for my creative writing class, a class I was thoroughly enjoying, to apply. I felt stupid, and maybe I was, but I had never heard anyone—professors or students—talk about a “performance course” before, and yet, there they were, and I had apparently taken too many. It was as though I was looking at a contract and had stumbled onto fineprint that I had neglected to read.

This otherwise insignificant blurb of text stuck in my mind for quite a while. What, I kept thinking, is the big deal with performance courses? So, I started looking into it. In STLCC’s online college catalog, there’s a section dedicated to general transfer requirements; it breaks down what they are, what classes apply to them, and most importantly, the details of the required credits per discipline.

General education requirements are standardized across all public colleges in Missouri. To get certain degrees, students must complete a 42-credit block of classes from a variety of disciplines, which transfer to all other public colleges in the state. This system is called Core 42, and it was implemented in 2018 after being approved by a law signed in 2016. To enact the law, a government board, the Coordinating Board for Higher Education (CBHE), created another government board, the Core Curriculum Advisory Committee (CCAC), to determine what classes are included in Core 42 and the rules that determine how many credits are required—or excluded—from each Core 42 discipline.

Looking at the catalog, I saw the same blurb as I did on my degree audit, and on the State of Missouri’s official website about Core 42, it’s there as well. I now had my answer, but I’m still left wondering why this requirement exists. Each discipline has its rules, yes, but Humanities and Fine Arts is unique in having a limit on one type of credit; no other field does that. It, too, feels odd that nearly everyone I spoke to, even a professor who taught primarily performance classes, was completely unfamiliar with this rule. I suppose it’s just one of those technical details that few of us know about until we’re forced to.