After two years, U. reviews pilot curriculum

The end of the year marks another milestone for the experimental pilot curriculum, and administrators are taking the opportunity to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the new academic blueprint for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Initiated in the fall of 2000 for incoming freshmen, the pilot curriculum will be tested until 2004. Currently, 200 freshmen and 200 sophomores are enrolled in the pilot curriculum, which significantly decreases the number of general requirements from ten to four. Pilot curriculum courses are more interdisciplinary and are often team-taught.

Administrators stress that the aim of the pilot curriculum is to identify a better curriculum than the current one. It is not meant to be adopted as is. Rather, the advantages and disadvantages will be analyzed so that the best features of the pilot curriculum will be incorporated into the new curriculum.

School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said that so far, the pilot curriculum "has been a terrifically successful experiment." But both he and College Dean Richard Beeman emphasized that this is, above all, an experiment.

"The pilot curriculum, first and foremost is a means by which the faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences will find the proper path toward the best possible curriculum for Penn students in the future," Beeman said.

"With the sophomores, we're moving into what I think is really the most important part of the experiment -- working with students to help them make the most of their four years here and encourage them to take active responsibility for their education," he added.

One of the pilot curriculum's most appealing features is the flexibility it gives students in controlling the direction of their individual undergraduate experiences, allowing them to craft their education with much more freedom and independence than the general curriculum permits.

Another strength lies in the interdisciplinary classes of the pilot curriculum, which has produced 18 new courses. These classes were designed to be different from what freshmen experienced in high school or would take as students fulfilling the general requirement.

The curriculum "has generated very novel new courses that take a fresh look at various subjects and have really stimulated both faculty and students to approach subjects in a new way," Preston said. "It's really that feature of the pilot curriculum as a hothouse of new courses, as a place where new courses are generated, that I think has been especially attractive."

However, the program has met mixed reviews. Students have complained that the team-teaching aspect of the experimental curriculum leads to poorly integrated subject matters.

English Professor Max Cavitch realized these student concerns after he and English Professor Michael Gamer teamed up this past semester to teach "Transatlantic Traffic: London, Philadelphia, and the World, 1666-1876."

"I know pilot students sometimes find it difficult to assimilate multiple perspectives on the same material," Cavitch said. "But that's what a liberal education is meant to help you do. So I believe the difficulty is salutary."

College freshman and pilot curriculum student Elena Hassan said the team-teaching aspect can be fantastic if the professors are good and if the subject is interesting. Otherwise, it can be a disaster when even one or two of the professors on the team is weak, or the material is not well integrated.

Hassan said she's not sure if she would recommend the pilot curriculum to other students. She said while the pilot's decreased general requirements are appealing, they also limit the amount of choice students have in choosing their courses. In the end, the pilot suffers the same complaints as the general curriculum -- students are forced to take classes they dislike simply to fulfill the requirement.

"There are two categories of science in the pilot," Hassan said. "I'm not really interested in either one of them, so I'm going to have to take two courses that I'm really not going to like."

But Associate Dean of History Walter Licht has observed the opposite -- that is, students are finally taking courses they enjoy.

Licht has been advising students for more than 20 years and says he is not at all satisfied with the standard curriculum. He recalls too many occasions in the past when his advisees would be motivated to register for a particular class out of the pressure to satisfy general requirements instead of out of a passion for the subject.

But Licht says his whole experience has changed with the ten pilot curriculum students he has advised for the past two years.

"I've had much longer and much more interesting conversations with these advisees than I've had with advisees in the past," Licht said. "In the established curriculum, we spent our time pouring over the sector requirements and finding courses they didn't want to take. I've greatly enjoyed not having to deal with that problem."

"Instead, I have been really working with them from day one on a long-range academic plan," he added.

But as he sends his ten sophomores to new advisors in the departments of their recently declared majors, Licht fears that all of the creative conversations he had with them will go by the wayside.

"Who will see to it that the plan is fulfilled and revised?" he asked.

Although Licht remains an advocate of the pilot curriculum, like many of his colleagues, he is concerned about "scaleability" -- that is, taking a curriculum designed for 200 students and adapting it to accommodate 1,600 students.

"In principal, from what I've watched so far, I'm very supportive," he said. "I hope the experiment perfects itself and is adopted. But there are some real organizational problems here. I don't know how we can take this experiment and make it the mandated experience for everyone."

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