Word: cores
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Between concentration requirements, secondary fields, citations, and the Core, Harvard students are lucky if they can manage to have one genuine elective per semester. But even after navigating all those requirements, another obstacle remains to choosing just any interesting class: the pressure to do well. Not everyone appreciates how intimidating it is to take classes from a department academically far away from a student’s own specialties. A fellow physics concentrator once explained to me that, since high school, she had been trained to be really good at math and physics, and she was frankly too scared...
...Core Program, ironically enough, bears part of the blame. The Core is supposed to encourage students to take classes from areas outside their concentration. But because most of the classes that meet its requirements are the designated “Core classes,” classified under the Core Curriculum rather than a particular department, most students stay confined to a tiny selection of classes. Of the 1500 classes listed in the Courses of Instruction, only 103 departmental classes count toward the Core, a disproportionate number of which are science or quantitative reasoning...
...Trapped between Core Courses that too often skirt rigorous mathematics and intimidating departmental courses, students in non-quantitative disciplines are largely ill-equipped to work with numbers...
...Opening up the Core and Gen Ed requirements and extending the deadline for making the pass/fail versus letter-grading choice will lower the invisible barrier many students place in front of venturing outside their academic comfort zones. There is no substitute for students’ willingness to embrace the challenges and risks of exploring new fields, but there is also no reason Harvard should not have academic policies that encourage...
...sciences and humanities can, and too often do, spend their four years fleeing natural logs and derivatives. What distinguishes this problem from the converse—of math and science concentrators in humanities and social science classes—is not only the poor content of Quantitative Reasoning (QR) Core courses, but also the extent to which mathematical knowledge relies largely upon the ability to execute certain basic numerical techniques...