The members of the curricular review committees have called for the replacement of the Core curriculum with a distributional requirement, pushing back concentration choice by a year and possibly switching to a Yale-style housing system, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 told the Undergraduate Council last night.

Gross attended the council meeting as a guest speaker and used his time to summarize the curricular review’s formal report, written by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, which is scheduled to be released today. Wolcowitz’ report is based on the findings of the four working groups of the curricular review.

Gross told the council yesterday that the committees wanted to break down the differences between honors and non-honors track concentrations, as well as work on giving students the opportunity to do a “capstone” project in their field of expertise that would not necessarily be a thesis.

“I think honors should be based more on the quality of their work, and right now, it’s more the quantity of their work,” he said.

Gross also said that the report suggests that students be allowed to fulfil their Harvard general education requirements either with two courses in four to five broad academic areas, or with their choice of Harvard College classes—“foundational courses in all these areas.”

“We’re going to propose that the Core be replaced,” Gross said at the Council’s weekly meeting.

Gross said he looked to Social Studies 10 as a possible paradigm for the Harvard College Courses and that a portion of these general education classes would likely be year-long.

“It’s more based on what some of the important things are in that field,” he said. “Harvard College Courses would be more how specialists get together and explain their subject to a generalist.”

Though the exact general education areas are still under discussion, Gross said he believed they would be the areas now delineated by the four divisional dean positions—the social sciences, life sciences, physical and engineering sciences, and humanities—as well as a general studies division, which would include a focus on international studies.

Along with this more flexible set of requirements, students will also have more time to mull over their eventual fields of study should the report’s suggestion to push back concentration choice—to the second semester of sophomore year—be accepted by the Faculty.

He added that the report proposes reducing that number of required concentration courses.

“The presumption will be 12 courses unless you need more,” Gross said.

Exceptions might include requirement-heavy concentrations, such as engineering sciences or biochemistry, both of which require up to 16 courses. Such departments would need to petition the Faculty’s academic deans in order to gain approval for their required course loads.

Gross also said the review wants to further look into the housing system in place at Yale University, in which first-year students are randomly assigned to residential colleges before they ever set foot on campus.

Gross cited alleviating of “the trauma of blocking” as one motivation for the proposal.