K-State 8 Information

*Applicable to students starting Summer 2011 and beyond*

The K-State 8 general education program helps students widen their perspectives, explore relationships among subjects and build critical and analytical thinking skills. K-State 8 exposes students to a broad range of knowledge in different academic areas. The program shapes well-rounded thinkers and helps prepare students for careers, graduate school and other post-graduate experiences.

What are the requirements for the K-State 8 General Education Program?

Each student must successfully complete credit-bearing courses or experiences to cover all of the K-State 8 areas. Some of the K-State 8 areas may be covered in the student's major. The intent of the K-State 8 is for students to explore the perspectives of disciplines that may be different from those of their own majors. For that reason, a minimum of four different course prefixes (e.g., AGEC, MATH, FSHS) must be represented in the fulfillment of the K-State 8 requirements. The K-State 8 areas include:

aesthetic experience and interpretive understanding
empirical and quantitative reasoning
ethical reasoning and responsibility
global issues and perspectives
historical perspectives
human diversity within the us
natural and physical sciences
social sciences

K-State 8 and ECE

Since both the electrical and computer engineering curriculums are well defined, the incorporation of the K-State 8 system is rather simple. The table below shows the K-State 8 areas that are covered by the required courses of the ECE curriculum.

K-State 8 Area	EE	CMPEN
Aesthetic experience and interpretive understanding	H&SS	H&SS
Empirical and quantitative reasoning	MATH 220	MATH 220
Ethical reasoning and responsibility	ECE 590	ECE 590
Global issues and perspectives	ECON 110	ECON 110
Historical perspectives	H&SS	H&SS
Human diversity within the U.S.	H&SS	H&SS
Natural and physical sciences	CHM 210	CHM 210
Social sciences	ECON 110	ECON 110

The boxes that are labeled H&SS are humanities and social science courses that the student is free to choose within the approved College of Engineering H&SS course list. These courses must be chosen to cover the three remaining K-State 8 required areas not covered in the ECE required courses. Therefore the student must simultaneously choose H&SS courses from the approved College of Engineering H&SS list and cross-reference the chosen course’s K-State 8 tags with the unfulfilled requirements.

K-State 8 course tag information can be found here.