Why did perfectly good subject abbreviations (e.g., MATH) have to change?
In most subjects, there were so many courses being taught across the state using so many different numbers that keeping a popular subject abbreviations would necessarily have meant renumbering courses to something that was already in use for a different course. Imagine the confusion if MATH 181 were changed to MATH 150 and MATH 150 were changed to MATH 130, etc. The same course number could end up meaning different things depending on when it was taken. The use of entirely new subject abbreviations avoids this difficulty.
