'Penn students graduate with a degree in fulfilling requirements," my academic advisor told me during my first 'Welcome to Penn' phone conversation last summer.
Advance Registration for students in the College begins this Monday and ends on Sunday, April 1, which means two weeks of brainstorming once again how to get those general requirements out of the way. Foundational Approaches. Sectors. It's all as much of a blur to me as it was nearly a year ago.
For some, the Advance Registration period means figuring out which courses will satisfy as many requirements as possible, ideally at the same time. For others, it means searching for the History and Tradition class that involves the greatest tradition and the least history. But regardless of the present dilemma, one thing stands to comfort all College students in the Class of 2009 and above: You're better off than the freshmen.
A number of interesting courses offered to Class of 2009, which fill the most dreaded of sectors, no longer satisfy requirements for freshmen. They've been wiped off the course-requirement list entirely, leaving us with the option of taking such courses as "Animal Behavior," if we so desire, for matters of simple pleasure.
The reason behind the reduction in courses available to freshmen is the newly-installed requirement policy, as explained to me by Kent Peterman, director of Academic Affairs.
"Students in the Class of 2009 and higher have to take 10 courses to fill general requirements, whereas the new policy only requires students to take seven courses," Peterman said.
Indeed, according to the College Web site for the Class of 2009 and earlier: The General Requirement requires each student in the College to take a total of ten courses: two in each of Sectors I, II, and III; one in each of Sectors IV, V, and VI; and one additional course either in Sector IV, V or VI or in Sector VII." Currently, freshmen only have to take one course in each sector.
Understandably, then, the number of courses offered for the first three sectors has declined significantly. But I still question why the number of courses that fulfill Sector V, Living World, has dropped from 27 to 13 this year, when freshmen and upperclassmen are all required to take the same number of Living World courses.
Furthermore, some of the courses that have been removed are much more appealing than those remaining. "Abnormal Psychology," for example, fulfills the Living World sector only for those in Class of 2009 and above. I'm currently enrolled in that course - clearly, with no motivation other than my genuine interest in the subject - and I sincerely believe other College students would find a penchant for the subject, if they had the opportunity to take this course for a requirement.
Other courses that were eliminated from the Living World sector include "Evolution of Behavior" and "Perception." Compared to "Paleontology" and "Cognitive Neuroscience," which are, of course, still available to freshmen, these two classes may as well be called "Philadelphia Nightlife" and "Origins of Adderall."
When asked why certain courses were removed under the new policy, Peterman explained that those courses were decidedly more difficult than the ones remaining.
But just because a class is more challenging does not mean students will not want to take it. Most of us are notably ambitious, and if we are truly more interested in one subject over another, a difference in the difficulty rating on Course Review is not going to stop us from enrolling in the first. It would just be nice if we could satisfy a requirement while we're at it.
"If some classes are not taught frequently enough or with enough seats in them so that students can use them to fill requirements, we remove them from the list," explained Janet Tighe, dean of freshmen and director of Academic Advising. "We also look at whether the class is still being taught the way it was supposed to be taught, or whether the department is as devoted to teaching the class as it once was."
But if this is the case, these classes should have been removed from the requirement list for all students. It's unfair to allow upperclassmen to continue taking these courses for general education credit, while freshmen are left with a much more limited list of options.
Certainly there are students somewhere out there who enjoy the burdens of foundational approaches and sectors, but I would conjecture that most of those students are upperclassmen.
Jamie France is a College freshman from Plantation, Fla. Her e-mail address is france@dailypennsylvanian.com. Le Petite Freshman appears on Fridays.
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