Here’s why Cornell fared so poorly:Previously, I've complained about the preponderance of "joke" classes in A&S, some of which appear on my transcript. I hate the names, but the classes are easy and satisfy requirements, so I take them.
“No credit given for Composition because the First-Year Writing Seminars are topic courses in a range of disciplines. No credit given for Mathematics because the Mathematics and Quantitative Reasoning requirement may be satisfied by courses of little college-level math such as ‘Mathematical Explorations’ and ['Mathematics and Politics'] and ‘Evaluating Statistical Evidence,’ a course in the sociology department noted in its description as ‘not a math class per se.’ No credit given for Natural or Physical Science because the Physical and Biological Sciences requirement may be satisfied by courses with little science content such as ‘The Language of Chemistry’ and ‘Why the Sky is Blue: Aspects of the Physical World’.”
Salem argues that "Cornell should remove joke courses from the list of eligible ways to fulfill breadth requirements." I think we can keep a lot of the courses if we change the course names and put some actual material into these classes.
If ACTA mocks Cornell's course offerings, I have to assume that employers and graduate school admissions officers also have a good laugh at what they see on some Cornell transcripts. For a university which tries to be Very Serious About Academics, Cornell ships off its students with some real holes on their transcripts.
I don't want to have to take a "real" science class at Cornell, but it probably wouldn't have killed me to suffer through one semester of something. It's not unreasonable for A&S to expect of this of its students, instead of winking as students satisfy requirements with "Blue Sky, Green Planet" and other such offerings.
This seems to be more of an issue for some colleges at Cornell than for others. For Human Ecology, I had to take a science course with a lab component in order to count toward my distribution requirements, even though my major has little relation to science. I was required to take an ethics class from a short list of approved courses. Some requirements have even been tightened since I entered, such as making it more difficult to use AP credit to place out of Calculus and recommending that students take a language. In Salem's column as well as this post, the words "Cornell" and "university" are used as synonyms for "the College of Arts and Sciences." I do not believe that this is so much a university-wide issue as it is one for specific colleges within the university.
ReplyDeleteTo see the distribution requirements for the PAM major for students who entered in 2006-07, click here:
http://www.human.cornell.edu/che/Academics/Undergraduate/Student_Services/Registrar/Degree_Progress/upload/PAM_06-07.pdf
From looking at the requirements, it seems like PAM (and I assume, HumEc in general) does a good job of forcing its students to take real science courses. I think that it would be good for A&S to requireeveryone to take one semester of Calculus, or one semester of a "hard" science. A&S does require students to take one course from a list of approved courses for some of its distribution requirements, but these lists tend to include some pretty easy offerings.
ReplyDeleteAs for your other point, I think it's confusing because ACTA was only evaluating A&S when it referred to "Cornell," just as they were only evaluating the liberal arts programs of the other universities on the list. But I do agree that it seems to be a problem that is for the most part specific to A&S.