In a recent survey conducted by the Student Assembly, a majority of students indicated that maintaining academic quality should be a main priority for the College. However, Dartmouth should go beyond mere maintenance of quality, and should constantly strive to provide the best undergraduate academic experience.
The College's general education requirements are one key area in need of improvement. The abolition of distributive requirements would be preferable to the current system, but a wide-ranging, rigorous set of core requirements would be even more beneficial to the student body.
The main goal of distributive requirements should be to produce well-rounded graduates and to encourage students to explore subjects outside of their chosen field of study. To fulfill this objective, Dartmouth tries to walk a line between an extensive, rigid core curriculum and a laissez-faire, unstructured approach. Unfortunately, this uneasy balance "is an example of a situation in which compromising between two good situations leads to a bad one," as Caleb Powers '08 pointed out in a 2007 column ("What Should Graduates Know?" April 11, 2007). The current system fails to provide students with a coherent set of academic abilities, and actually decreases the quality of a Dartmouth education.
First, the "general" in general education requirements is a misnomer. The only thing general about them are their descriptions in The Organization, Regulations and Courses book, replete with abstractions. Courses qualifying for the culture and identity requirement, for example, "may study the relations of culture and identity with reference to cultural productions from any part of the world."
Despite the frequently touted advantages of a take-anything liberal arts education, most employers and graduate schools will want us students to have something concrete to show come graduation. Coupled with the lack of pre-major advising at Dartmouth, this means that many students, even those who have already completed the whole battery of general education and world culture requirements, still find themselves scrambling to complete courses required by graduate schools or jobs during their last few terms at Dartmouth. A coherent, substantive core curriculum taken early in a student's career would set students off to a better start.
So what should such a program include? It could be modeled after existing, skill-oriented requirements, including first-year writing courses, the foreign language requirement and the statistics prerequisite to many majors. Some other categories in this core curriculum could include math, biology, history, economics, government and English or world literature.
In most departments, such a change would require better introductory courses. Stronger introductory courses could still encourage students to explore new fields of study -- an engaging, deftly presented survey of American history (yes, such a thing does exist) could spark a student's interest in a subject just as well as a more specialized course.
For a class to be truly worthwhile, it must be not only well-taught, but also attended by a motivated audience. The current system undermines a class' capacity to meet these dual requirements by encouraging uninterested students to enroll in certain highly specific courses only to meet distributive requirements. This is evident in the large numbers of students enrolled in classes such as ENGS 3, the fabled TAS requirement-filler. I have no problem with the course itself, and I'm sure the subject matter could be fascinating and relevant to some students. However, I find it hard to believe that it captured the imaginations of all 229 students who took it during the Class of 2009's sophomore summer.
Obscure courses do not make for good general education requirements. It is not particularly helpful to expose students to a recondite issue with no broader conceptual framework within which to understand it. Even though this may be enjoyable to some students, meeting a distributive requirement should not be a student's only motivation for taking a course.
True, a student may occasionally find a diamond in the rough of the current distributive requirements system. More often than not, however, classes we take to fulfill these requirements are those we could hardly care less about. Waiting for 65 tedious minutes to drag by in a class we've only taken because it is an easy SOC/W credit is neither pleasant nor useful. Our time at Dartmouth is far too valuable to waste like that.
