Spring 2012 | Volume 35, No. 2

The Joy of OCAAT

By Dee Ann Rexroat '82

During a New Student Orientation activity last fall, small groups of first-year students answered trivia questions on their way downtown for a community event called Viva Mount Vernon. One response made me smile.

"What does the abbreviation 'Old Sem' stand for?" I asked.

"Old Semester?" a student answered tentatively.

Well. It has been 33 years since One Course At A Time (OCAAT) replaced Cornell's semester system, which was before these students were born. For many of them, OCAAT was a major factor in their decision to attend Cornell. And while the nickname of the original campus building, Old Sem, is short for Iowa Conference Seminary (Cornell's name from 1853–1857), it is not hard to imagine how new students might connect this phrase with a different point in college history.

Faculty voted for OCAAT in 1978, and since then have taught courses in intense three-and-a-half-week terms, followed by four-day block breaks. It is what makes Cornell nearly unique in higher education.

And yet—as the saying goes—the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the end, OCAAT is a delivery method for the same rigorous liberal arts curriculum Cornell has offered for generations. Cornell alumni, pre- or post-OCAAT, experienced a transformational education.

On the following pages are brief articles by six faculty members in divergent fields, describing how they teach differently because of the OCAAT calendar. The first article, by Professor Emeritus Richard Peterson, describes some of the similarities before and after OCAAT. In the end, he writes "OCAAT was another way to package what we had always done."