Like everyone else on campus, I came into this term with high hopes and inextinguishable optimism. I planned on finding a PE credit that didn't actually require athletic prowess or dedication (whatup club lax), joining the elite institution of B@B "hard guyz" and finally the ultimate goal knocking out the dreaded ART distributive. But when I began perusing the registrar for interesting art classes, all the ones that caught my eye were in the studio art department. And this, in my mind, meant only one thing: non-NRO-able. It wasn't that I wanted to take the NR on the transcript, but I knew that in the likely scenario in which the professor was unimpressed with my Picasso-like charcoals, I would have liked the safety of the Non-Recording Option.
In addition to studio art, the government, economics, art history and speech departments have also opted out of allowing students to use the NRO (with the exception of Econ 2). Although various higher-level courses and lower-level language courses are also out of bounds when it comes to the NRO, these departments are the only ones that have an outright ban on the NRO.
If I were to claim to be the first person to point out the flaws plaguing our NRO system, I would be a liar. Among others, Tom Mandel '11 decried this problem in a previous column ("Failing the NRO," Jan. 22, 2009). But what I believe these conversations have overlooked is the mutual understanding between students, professors and administrators that the NRO is a failed system.
The philosophy behind the NRO is clear. Concern over our GPAs can limit our academic purview, restricting us to study only within our academic comfort zones. Physics majors then take all their classes in Wilder Hall, while the economics majors stick to Silsby. This pigeonhole effect runs directly counter to the goals of a liberal arts education Dartmouth seeks to provide: that through diverse academic exploration, one can develop intellectual capabilities unobtainable through single-subject or specialized study. The NRO, then, allows students to expose themselves to the foreign sunlight of different academic departments without having to worry about an unsightly sunburn on their GPAs.
If the goal of the NRO is to encourage academic exploration, why are some departments allowed to opt out of accepting the NRO entirely? Surely a biology major could benefit from an understanding of the market economy. And might not an introductory drawing class change how a government major sees the world? Aren't these the types of crucial academic experimentation that the NRO is meant to promote?
What has happened, I believe, is the steady perversion of the use of the NRO. You don't have to be at Dartmouth long to realize that misuse, even abuse, of the NRO is rampant across campus. What is worse, however, is that those departments that have opted out of the NRO are, in a sense, tacitly endorsing this practice. Their stance seems to be this: abuse the NRO to coast through classes and to underperform, just make sure it's not in our department. They have implicitly acknowledged the misuse, but refuse to take the steps toward meaningful, systemic reform.
If the NRO is to be a legitimate and respectable tool for Dartmouth students, it must undergo drastic reform. Students should not be able to edit their NRO limits two weeks before the final. Secondly, a limit of six should also be imposed on the number of times students can elect to set an NRO at the start of the term, even if they never receive a grade of "NR" on their transcripts. This will force students to be more judicious and frugal in deciding which classes to NRO. Lastly, departments as a whole should not be allowed to opt out of the NRO only high-level classes or lower-level language classes.
If we can all agree the current NRO system promotes an unscholarly and apathetic approach to classes at Dartmouth, we must seek to change it. The government, economics and studio art departments should not be allowed to check out of a fundamentally flawed system without attempting to fix it; that is both a parochial and selfish attitude to adopt. Instead we must address the problem and institute the changes necessary to promote academic exploration without allowing for academic apathy.
