Dartmouth College first-years this fall will be the first to deal with a set of new basic distribution requirements as a result of the schools' first major curriculum change in nearly four decades.

The new requirements, which have been in the works since 1990, change the focus of the school's distribution requirements from three major fields to several more specific areas of study, according to Dartmouth Professor of Earth Sciences Gary D. Johnson.

Johnson, the chair of the Committee on Instruction (COI), which is charged with implementing the changes, said yesterday that the number of requirements has been reduced from 12 to 10. But the list of requirements now has more breadth, Johnson said.

Formerly, Dartmouth required undergraduates to take four courses in the sciences, four in the humanities and four in social studies.

Dartmouth, which is on the quarter system, requires 35 courses for an undergraduate degree. Students take an average of 3 courses per quarter.

"It was a very arbitrary, not an academic set of distribution requirements," Johnson said. "This lets students get away from the departmental structure and look at course offerings. It defines courses by intellectual content, not department content."

Johnson described the new distribution requirement structure as a "pyramid."

The Ad-Hoc Curriculum Review Committee, of which Johnson was also a member, identified eight main areas of study for students.

"As we began to look at the courses that were open to the college, categories sort of naturally fell out," Johnson said.

One, social analysis, should sound familiar to Harvard undergraduates. The others are: the arts; comparative or international studies; deductive and quantitative reasoning; literature; natural and physical science; technological and applied science and a grouping that encompasses the classics, history, philosophy and religion.

Students have to take one course in each discipline except for social analysis and natural and physical science, in which two courses are required.

One of the courses taken must be a multidisciplinary course and two must be lab science courses. Three of the 10 courses must give the student "world cultural exposure"-in European, United States and non-Western culture.

In addition, all departments are being encouraged to create a senior culminating experience, such as a thesis or research project, if none exists and to create a minor in the field.

Johnson said, however, that the new set of requirements will not mean the development of sets of classes specifically geared towards meeting the requirements.

"It's a more structured passage through basic requirements," he said. "I don't want to call it a core curriculum because it's not a specific set of courses that students have to take."