PE Requirement? More like a suggestion.
Camryn Sanchez ‘21
According to the Sarah Lawrence College website, PE credits are an alleged requirement for undergraduate students, but students who do not complete their credits by their senior year do not face any consequences.
In light of current difficulties created by the pandemic, the school is offering more options for students to earn PE credits, but still calls the credits a “requirement.”
Brooke Pauley ’21, a second semester senior and an editor at the Phoenix, received an email a few weeks into the spring semester informing her that she had not completed her mandatory PE credit requirement. “I had to pick something that both didn’t overlap with any of my current studies and left all my time commitments for my internship open,” Pauley said. “It was incumbent on me to pick a day that was convenient for me, and also it was odd because I got this email a few weeks into the semester.’”
The athletics website states that PE credits are in no way tied to academics: “Physical education credits are recorded separately from normal academic credits. They are not included in your GPA calculation and cannot be applied to the credits required to complete a degree.”
PE Coordinator Erin Gunther said that when a student does not complete their credits it appears as an incomplete, and that students who are worried about not meeting their requirements should just reach out to her. It is unclear where the “incomplete” will appear as Registrar Administrative Assistant Melissa McCarter stated: “transcripts are records of academic classes and in either case, PE credits do not show up on the transcript.”
Gunther confirms that students who do not complete PE credits are still able to walk at graduation and receive a diploma. “There’s no reason to get really worried about it. Like if you reach out to me we can definitely talk about different things.”
Inevitably, many seniors in their final semester realize they have not completed their PE credit requirements –– and panic. According to the department of athletics, two of the four required credits should be earned in the first year of enrollment.
“There’s a whole rash of seniors without this being completed,” Pauley said. “I do regret not knocking one of my classes out or more in the first year.”
Some prestigious institutions including MIT and Dartmouth require PE credits, but most four-year colleges do not. PE requirements are becoming less and less common according to a 2013 study by Oregon State University which found that “the physical education requirement declined from an all-time high of 97% in the 1920s and 1930s to an all-time low of 39.55% in 2010.”
Gunther says that requiring PE classes is a part of Sarah Lawrence’s well-rounded education model. Pauley said that the PE classes offered are commendable and important, but she does not necessarily believe it should be a graduation requirement. “More to the point, I don't necessarily think that it should have stayed the same given the coronavirus pandemic because so many of us were gone, either abroad and then further still for the fall semester,” she added. “I realized that unless I had that commitment binding me, I wouldn’t do it. And I suspect I’m not alone in that.”
Physical education is important for all students, however the severe wording on MySLC that “all undergraduate students are required to complete a physical education requirement” suggests that students who fail to complete their credits will face some sort of consequence that does not appear to exist. It might be more accurate to say that earning PE credits is encouraged, but seniors can be assured that without their credits, they will still receive a perfectly good degree.