Appendix E — Curriculum

This appendix provides some additional detail on the changes to the curriculum and majors through the years. It is not our intent to provide a complete history of the Academy curriculum. The Permanent Professors have invested many hours of study and discussion as they have carefully evolved the curriculum to ensure it provides the best-educated graduates for service in our Air Force. For a more detailed study of the curriculum, a complete collection of the Air Force Academy Annual Historical Reports, the Academy Catalogs, and the records of the Curriculum Committee are archived in the McDermott Library Special Collections.

Major Changes

The Air Force Academy curriculum has changed significantly since the first curriculum was developed and published by the Air Academy Planning Group in 1949. The Sterns-Eisenhower Commission approved the Planning Board’s work later that year. That curriculum was refined by General Harmon’s Air Academy staff in the Pentagon, 1949–1954, and published on September 1, 1954, to guide the new Academy faculty. This curriculum had about 138 semester hours in 46 courses that all cadets would take. umanities/social sciences subjects were 46 percent and basic science/engineering were 54 percent. This planning curriculum did need revision, as the planners, when unable to choose between two alternatives, often had included both for decision by the faculty then charged with implementing the curriculum. The newly formed faculty worked earnestly to abide by the principles established by the Planning Group and validated by the Sterns-Eisenhower study. One founding principle that rose to prominence was that there should be a balance between humanities/social sciences studies and basic science/engineering. As can be seen in Table E-1, the prescribed curriculum approved by General Harmon on April 29, 1955, had a difference of only 1/3 of a semester hour. It is interesting that the 1955 curriculum lists credits in fractional semester hours down to 1/18. Later practice allowed no smaller units than ˝ semester hour. By choice of the senior year elective a cadet could achieve greater emphasis in the technical or non-technical. Every cadet took navigation training because flight training had not been authorized yet.

As the enrichment program matured, elective majors became available, and then majors were required, the principle of a balanced core remained. There continued to be considerable effort by the faculty to ensure a core curriculum that best served the Air Force while developing academic majors to both challenge the cadets’ interests and meet the Air Force’s changing needs. In the early 1960s the semester hours earned for military training and physical education were revised upward to better match the hours devoted to these subjects. Thus, for Academic Year 1961–1962 the academic core was 136 semester hours of prescribed courses, evenly divided between humanities/social sciences and basic science/engineering, with an additional 7 ˝ semester hours, two courses, chosen by the cadet among pilot screening, navigation indoctrination, or enrichment courses. The military training/airmanship program was 25 ˝ semester hours and the athletic program was 12 ˝ hours for a graduation requirement of 185 semester hours. Another innovation tried in the physics core courses this academic year was non-homogeneous sectioning. Prior to this experiment the cadets had been assigned to a section based on their potential performance in the course. For physics, homogeneous sectioning meant that cadets with high grades in previous math and chemistry courses were grouped together for the first physics course, and remaining sections were formed down the line until the cadets who had done the poorest in prior courses also were together. Similar procedures were followed by the other departments for the other courses. The operating principle was that the section instructor could better address the needs of the students when they were of similar ability. This method of sectioning was used at West Point. Non-homogeneous sectioning, with the advantage that each section had a natural mixture of stronger and weaker students, was eventually adopted by the Academy. However, several departments partially retained the principle by offering honors sections for the better students even when there was no formal “honors” program.

With the introduction of the “majors for all” program for the Class of 1966, the core became 54 semester hours of humanities/social sciences and 49 hours of basic science/engineering. Cadets earned a major by taking 16 additional courses (43 semester hours.) Leadership and military training was 27 ˝ semester hours and physical education was 14 ˝ hours for a total core curriculum of 145 semester hours and a graduation requirement of 188 semester hours. Six years later for the Class of 1973, these requirements had changed very little: the academic core was now 99 hours, leadership and military training had decreased ˝ semester hour, PE did not change, and the majors’ requirements increased by 3 ˝ semester hours, leaving the graduation requirement 1 semester hour lower.

Table E-2 below (from Dr. Dean Wilson/USAFA/DFR/Talking Papers/May 12, 2005, and April 11, 2011) shows representative changes to the curriculum through the years. Changes to the curriculum made in an academic year usually became graduation requirements for a class graduating two to three years later. The years in Table E-2 refer to the effective class year. The major curriculum change for the Class of 2021 is not included because it was covered in Chapter 3.

Majors

Table E-3 shows the majors that cadets earned arranged by the year that cadets first graduated with the major. The major usually was approved two to three years prior to the first graduates. Often there were more majors available to the cadets, but no one chose that field of study. For example, when majors were first required of all graduates in the Class of 1966, there were 17 majors available, but cadets chose only 13 of them for their studies.

In most years there have been roughly equal numbers of graduates in non-technical majors (humanities, social sciences, or interdisciplinary) as there have been in technical majors (basic sciences, engineering, or interdisciplinary), although the ranges have varied about 20 percentage points: from 31–57 percent of majors and 43–69 percent, respectively.