MAP Clarification

Elective. We believe that completion of a MAP should not be a graduation requirement, although is possible that a department would decide to require a MAP for completion of a major or for honors.
Timing. Following the sentiment expressed by faculty in the second of the faculty forums, we propose that these mentored advanced projects be offered late in a student's academic career, specifically, in the senior year, the summer before senior year, or, perhaps, the junior year.
Context. We propose that MAPs may take place in a discipline or may be interdisciplinary. They may take place in the context of a course or seminar, or independently. They may take place during the academic year or during the summer.
Distinctions. We recognize that there are some "boundary issues" in distinguishing between MAPs and other kinds of work. We believe that many projects that have previously been offered as four-credit independents, four-credit summer research projects, or concentration research projects have the five features listed above. But not all of this previous work would qualify, if all five features were lacking. What we propose, then, is not simply a grand re-naming of what we have been doing for years. Questions have also been asked about whether department or concentration seminars would qualify as MAPs; we suggest that although a project in a seminar might well qualify as a MAP, the term MAP not be applied to the seminars themselves. We hope that this distinction will make clear that the seminar project would need to constitute a significant (perhaps close to half a semester's work) part of that work in order for it to be designated as a MAP.
Span. The first stage of this curricular experiment has already indicated to us that many valuable MAP experiences need to develop over a longer time than just one semester or one ten-week period in the summer. We propose, therefore, that MAPs have the potential of a span extending beyond either of these periods.