If you're free during the 10 time slot in the next few weeks, I encourage you to go sit in the overflow room of Astronomy 2/3 in Wilder 111 for the first few minutes of class. It's quite a spectacle to see. Watching the professor who is in the primary lecture hall on a projector screen, students sit on the edge of their seats awaiting an announcement as to whether there will be a pop quiz at the end of class. Backpacks remain unopened. Notebooks are non-existent. Nearly every seat in the overflow room is filled, while the much larger main room remains relatively empty. The intellectual curiosity that is supposed to distinguish Dartmouth students is nowhere to be found. Once the professor announces that there will be no quiz, the overflow room quickly empties, leaving only a few students to revel in their newfound elbowroom. Why stay in class when you can watch the lectures later online?
First of all, the mere idea of an overflow room is ludicrous and contradicts what Dartmouth stands for professor interaction and relatively small class sizes. There is no question that there should be a cap on such classes to fit everyone into the main lecture hall, especially if the College wants to maintain its top ranking in undergraduate teaching by US News and World Report. More importantly, however, courses like ASTR 2/3 despite being well designed and taught have become go-to courses for students to fulfill certain distributive requirements, particularly during Sophomore Summer.
Along with Classics 4 and Computer Science 4, ASTR 2/3 is a stereotypical Sophomore Summer course that students take to "get some distribs out of the way," as countless friends have described to me. It should go without saying that distributive requirements should be more than things that students have to get out of the way. If a liberal arts education at Dartmouth has any meaning, students should be taking courses that interest them outside of their major and minor field. As the system is set up now, however, students are forced to find the easiest courses to fulfill the distributive requirements that cannot be fulfilled within their respective academic fields.
Given the importance of GPAs nowadays, students cannot risk taking a standard course in an academic field other than their own. The inequality of GPAs across academic departments makes this problem even worse, particularly for students in the social sciences and humanities where grade inflation is most rampant. As a government major, for example, I would never consider taking a standard chemistry course despite being interested in it I wouldn't get a good grade and my GPA would go to pieces. The only option for students like myself is to pick courses designed for non-majors like ASTR 2/3, which serve as clearinghouses for certain requirements.
The introduction of the non-recording option was a valid attempt by the College to encourage students to experiment with subjects that may be new to them. A course in which a student receives an NR, however, cannot be applied to distributive or World Culture requirements. With 35 credits to complete before they graduate, students cannot risk receiving an NR in a class they take to fulfill a distributive requirement. As a result, students justifiably look for the historically easiest classes, regardless of interest, to fulfill the requirements that they need.
One potential solution to this problem is for the College to introduce an NRO that could be counted towards distributive or World Culture requirements. Instead of setting the lower bound of the NRO at an E, however, they could set it higher to a C or C+. This would ensure that students would have to work to get credit for the requirement. More importantly, it would encourage students to take courses that they are in fact interested in to fulfill their requirements.
The purpose of distributive and World Culture requirements is to ensure that Dartmouth students receive a well-rounded education. To be sure, non-astronomy majors with an interest in astronomy should in fact take ASTR 2/3 to fulfill their science with lab requirement. Judging by the exodus at the beginning of class when there isn't a quiz, however, I think there is a large number of students in the class who are not particularly interested in the material. Instead, they are taking the course for the same reason I am to get the science with lab distributive out of the way. A liberal arts education should be more than that.
