Adam Goodman | Columbia's got something right

We've all experienced the thrill of finding that perfect class. You know, the one with the 1.38 difficulty rating that fulfills that annoying requirement? It's a great feeling. It also illustrates why the College's curriculum is fatally flawed and needs to be scrapped in favor of a core.

With the current curriculum, the College seeks to strike a balance between flexibility and structure, breadth and depth. For College students, the bad news is that they're burdened with several requirements in fields of study that they're probably not interested in. The good news is that there are plenty of courses that fulfill these requirements, many of which are notorious for their lack of difficulty. Here's the popular path:

1. Take easy course you're not interested in (e.g. MATH 170: Ideas in Math, SOCI 137: Sociology of Media and Pop Culture).

2. Don't go to class (unless attendance counts for 30 percent, as it did when I took MATH 170).

3. Show up for tests and to hand in essays (note: this step often may not apply).

4. Learn nothing (or, optimistically, very little).

5. Repeat.

6. Repeat.

7. You get the picture.

The College is aware of this problem and, to its credit, has sought to neutralize it.

"The new version of the curriculum was intended to address some of what you're talking about," SAS Dean Dennis DeTurck told me. "We really tried to get back to the idea of a little more structure, especially with the sector requirements, so that there's a notion of a little more control."

To that end, the new curriculum did away with distributional requirements and initiated a systematic review of each sector (one per year), where the faculty examines the content and pedagogy of each requirement-fulfilling course.

But as long as the curriculum has any kind of flexibility, the College will never be able to surmount the aforementioned easy-A issue.

"The problem is that there are some courses which find their way into the curriculum," said DeTurck. "And at that moment it was probably a terrific course . but then somebody else takes it over and does it in a way which is not as germane."

DeTurck thinks consistent oversight and review will avoid this problem, but I'm skeptical. The College can examine every single course that fulfills a requirement with a fine-toothed comb, but courses will still be vulnerable to changing professors with different standards and methodologies (consider that DeTurck himself once taught a far more rigorous version of Ideas in Math). And when easy A's become available, that news will spread faster across this campus than syphilis in a brothel.

The flexible curriculum is a nice idea in theory, but counterproductive and ineffective in practice (kind of like communism). The College has two viable options: either develop a core curriculum or go the Brown route and get rid of requirements entirely. The latter option ignores the value of a broad, liberal-arts education, where students survey a wide variety of academic fields. That leaves the core.

I know, I know, cores are supposed to be evil, or as DeTurck put it, "un-Penn." But our core doesn't have to be like Columbia's, which is excruciatingly comprehensive and biased toward the humanities.

Rather, I envision a four-course core, which consolidates the College's complex set of requirements. One course would cover literature, arts and music, while incorporating the writing-intensive aspects of a critical writing seminar. Another could focus on world history and civilizations, covering the new cross-cultural analysis requirement. A third would examine the social sciences. Lastly, there would be a natural sciences and mathematics course that would take care of the quantitative data analysis and logical reasoning requirements. The courses would have unchanging syllabi and would likely require professors to teach classes jointly, along with a flurry of guest lectures. Oh, and they would be hard.

Such a curriculum would take a massive amount of effort, planning and organization, but it would be worth it. The Penn core could function as an overview of the sciences and liberal arts, a way to expose students to all sorts of academic methodologies, approaches and fields (which is really the point of our failing curriculum in the first place).

Four courses (plus the foreign language requirement) where students actually learn. That would be it. No more wasted courses. No more meaningless A's. The best part? College kids would actually have more flexibility with the rest of their education.

Or we can continue with our current easily manipulated and fatally flawed curriculum. The ball is in the College's court.

Adam Goodman is a College junior from San Diego. His e-mail address is goodman@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Devil's Advocate appears on Thursdays.

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