State University of New York at Potsdam
AC-1: Academic Courses

We began with the Environmental Studies program major and minor requirements and evaluated them for the course criteria. We also reached out to departments and individual faculty to get info about potential courses. We then counted all course sections offered in the past three calendar years (2017-2019). We counted only lecture and seminar course-types and excluded labs and recitations since they are all attached to lecture courses and would have inflated the numbers dramatically (for example, one geology class might have three lab sections for students to choose from but they are all still in the main lecture section of the course). We also excluded all of the individualized course types listed below (internships, tutorials, theses, independent studies, practica, etc.) and all courses in our school of music (most of them are lessons and ensembles).

The discrepancy between the number of courses listed in the inventory and the totals listed above in Table 1 is due to the way the data are available. The inventory is simply a listing and description of the courses in the catalog that fit the criteria. The numbers in table one reflect all of the instances of each course being offered in a three year period. For example, ENVR 110: Introduction to Environmental Studies is typically offered 6-8 times in a year (3-4 sections per semester). So the numbers in Table 1 were gathered by asking the registrar's office for a total count of courses (lecture and seminar type only) offered over the 3-year period and then looking up specifically how many sections of each of the courses in the inventory were offered in that same time period.