Piloting an academic course

Next year's College of Arts and Sciences freshmen will be the first class to matriculate under the new general education curriculum, marking the first overhaul of the College's General Requirement since 1987.

This struck me as a big deal, so I sat down with Kent Peterman, the College's director of academic affairs, to talk it over.

Peterman took out a chart with both the old and the new requirements on it, and he tried to explain to me which requirements had been combined, expanded and downsized. He attempted to elucidate the new interdisciplinary sectors and reveal how double-counting credits would work differently under the new system. I used all my fingers and all my toes, but I just couldn't get it.

Peterman sighed and tried another approach. "Basically," he said, "they'll end up with one more free elective total."

Wait. What? Oh.

The General Requirement will be slimmed down from 10 sectors to seven. But the nebulous skills and methods requirements -- which includes the writing, foreign language and quantitative data analysis sectors -- is getting two credits fatter. So, the first change to the curriculum in nearly 20 years will mean a net result of only one fewer required course.

I do not mean to belittle the changes in the new curriculum. Double-counting makes the arithmetic more difficult, and it is too early to tell exactly how different the new system will be from the old one. The faculty has not even announced which classes will fulfill each requirement. And through the extensive review process the decision makers found that the current regime is working out pretty well.

So why isn't the new curriculum good enough for me? Because the results of a significant academic experiment -- the Pilot Curriculum -- indicate that the changes should go further.

The Pilot Curriculum includes 200 students from each College class starting with the Class of 2004 and ending with the Class of 2008. The scope of this experiment must not be overlooked. It lasted for eight years and included over 1,000 students. The Pilot Curriculum diverges from the current system in a variety of ways, but the key fact is this: Pilot students, myself included, faced not nine or 10 general requirements but four.

Under the auspices of Richard Beeman, then-dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, the Pilot Curriculum was designed in 1999 to test the waters for reforming of the College curriculum by investigating how students who were allowed more freedom in choosing would respond.

Six years into the experiment, surprising preliminary results have emerged. According to the proposal for the new system adopted by the faculty last spring, "An important lesson to be learned from the Pilot Curriculum report is that the College of Arts and Sciences in fact has an academic culture and curriculum that is resilient and generally independent of the set of requirements imposed on the students."

Peterman explained this to me as well -- even though Pilot students weren't required to take the sort of classes that the faculty deems essential, they did anyway. According to him, the data indicate that Pilot students enroll in classes like "Abnormal Psychology" and "Introduction to Macroeconomics" at the almost exactly the same rate as other students.

So with fewer requirements, students won't squander their freedom and miss out on a complete liberal arts education. The Pilot Curriculum had other problems, including unpopular team-taught classes and a baffling research requirement. But the four-requirement regime was a resounding success and an uplifting indication that Penn does indeed have an academic institutional character.

The curricular review also found that even the current General Requirement "makes it possible for students to evade the spirit of the various requirements, even while fulfilling them to the letter."

In other words, some students will always find ways to avoid being challenged.

"My friends in the regular curriculum are taking ridiculously simple classes to fulfill their requirements," College senior and Pilot survivor Jennifer Kessler said, "But I had the opportunity to explore my interests in great depth because of my freedom."

The Pilot experiment demonstrated that fewer requirements don't hurt students. More requirements obviously can, both by forcing students to sit through classes that don't interest them and by preventing students from pursuing their passions as deeply as they'd like. But the faculty and administration have ignored their own findings.

Four worked in the pilot curriculum. Subtracting three and adding two is not enough.

Daniel Nieh is a senior East Asian Languages and Civilizations major from Portland, Ore. Low End Theory appears on Fridays.

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