New College of Florida

New College of Florida is a public liberal arts honours college in Sarasota, Florida. It was founded as a private institution and is now an autonomous college of the State University System of Florida. It severed its ties with the University of South Florida in 2001 to become the eleventh independent school in the Florida State University System and adopted its current name: New College of Florida.

Four core principles form the base of New College's academic philosophy:

(1) each student is responsible in the last analysis for his or her own education,

(2) the best education demands a joint search for learning by exciting teachers and able students,

(3) students' progress should be based on demonstrated competence and real mastery rather than on the accumulation of credits and grades,

(4) students should have, from the outset, opportunities to explore in-depth, areas of interest to them. To the end of putting this philosophy into practice, New College uses a unique academic program that differs substantially from those of most other educational institutions in four key ways:

• Narrative evaluations: at the completion of each course, students receive an evaluation written by the instructor critiquing their performance and course work, along with a satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or incomplete designation. Letter grades and grade-point-averages are not used at New College.
• Contract System: at the start of each semester, students negotiate a contract with their faculty adviser, specifying their courses of study and expectations for the semester. At the completion of the term, the academic adviser compares the student's performance with the requirements defined in the contract and determines whether the student has "passed" the contract, or not. Among other requirements, completing seven contracts is a prerequisite to graduation by the college.
• Independent Study Projects: the month of January is reserved for independent projects at New College, a period when no traditional courses are held. Independent Study Projects run the gamut from short, in-depth, academic research projects to internships, lab work, and international exchanges. Students are required to complete three independent study projects prior to being graduated.
• Senior Thesis: each student is required to write an original and lengthy thesis in their discipline, and to defend it before a committee of at least three faculty members. Depending on the area of concentration of each student, a senior thesis may take the form of an original research paper, performing and documenting a scientific or social-scientific experiment or research study, or an original composition. This requirement usually is completed during the final two semesters of a student's fourth year.