Course selection is one of the most stressful parts of each term. When the window opens, the race to piece together the perfect schedule, with the right mix of major courses, distributive requirements and maybe a lay-up class, begins.
Given that course add-drop period begins today, students are once again engaged in a systematic craze. This manifested itself in a conversation I had with a '16, who was dismayed by the drive with which students pursue the "perfect" schedule. He did not understand why so many of his peers seek out lay-up classes. His view is that students attend college to further themselves academically and that they should enroll in classes that will challenge and interest them.
Although college is clearly not just about the classes we take, Dartmouth students should remember why we are ultimately here. That reason differs for every individual, but there is surely some academic component to our enrollment. With that in mind, it is important to consider why students take lay-ups in the first place. More often than not, it is for one of two reasons: either the student has two other difficult classes and needs an easy third to keep his or her sanity, or the student does not see significant enough benefit to taking a class that may be harder or more time consuming than a lay-up.
In both of these cases, it seems that the incentives for course selection are misplaced. Because lay-up courses tend to carry little work and a high median grade, students who take these classes are afforded the dual benefit of receiving a high grade while doing less-than-average amounts of work. It is crucial to remember that typically "tougher" courses and majors afford a signaling mechanism to employers and graduate schools, which works against these perverse incentives. But with the breadth of subject areas and topics that the course catalog covers, it is unlikely that either companies or other institutions of higher learning will be able to keep up with the most up-to-date information about course difficulty at Dartmouth.
To address this issue, Dartmouth currently includes median grades on student transcripts. Yet beating the median in a course that has historically been less involved and has carried a lower workload is clearly not as impressive a feat as exceeding the median in a rigorous class. Clearly this is a shortfall of the current course system. We fail to fully reward those who pursue difficult courseloads through the incentives that encourage schedules full of easy classes.
In order to resolve this problem, the difficulty of a class should be more accurately reflected on transcripts. The College should weigh credits for classes differently and according to their workload. This would mean that certain courses, such as reading and writing-intensive history classes or science classes that require a lab, would carry more credit and a higher GPA weighting than those with a smaller workload. Under this system, each hour of work would be equalized across all classes, no matter the aggregate number of hours input during the term.
The weighting for each class could be determined through a system that makes use of both course evaluations and input from students and faculty into relative workloads. Course evaluations, which are already completed for every class, would be a rather straightforward method to gauge the difficulty of a class. But because students may not always be honest on evaluations, and there is a clear potential problem of self-selection into courses, a group of students and professors could serve as a troubleshooting redundancy. In short, though it would be a bit difficult to determine which classes carry the most work, there is clearly room for improvement in the current framework.
The question of assigning differing amounts of credit to different classes ultimately comes down to if we want to acknowledge the time and effort put in to a class. If we continue to ignore such discrepancies, then it would be surprising to see Dartmouth students change their attitudes about lay-up classes. But if we can give students an incentive to challenge themselves, we will end up with not only a fairer academic system, but one with students who take classes for the right reasons.
