Students Add Up Pluses and Minuses of QR Requirement

Kinks are still being worked out of the system, but students and teaching staff of the four courses that were offered as part of the new Quantitative Reasoning (QR) portion of the Core are declaring the requirement a success.

The classes offered during the sub-field's maiden semester covered topics ranging from health care economics to deductive logic. About 170 students enrolled in the courses.

"I was delighted with my class--it was larger than we expected and there was a wide range of backgrounds," says Benedict H. Gross, Leverett professor of mathematics and instructor for QR 28: "The Magic of Numbers."

"It was lots of fun to teach," says Gross, who also serves as the chair of the Core subcommittee on the QR.

Yet the praise is far from unqualified. Some students complain that the classes are too easy, while some professors say they worry the current QRR offerings do not teach students enough about basic statistics.

The Stats

The QR officially joined the other 10 Core subdivisions this past fall. Starting with the Class of 2003, students cannot satisfy the QR requirement by passing an examination. Instead, all students must fulfill a statistics requirement in the Core before graduating.

First-year students who are already slated to take math or statistics classes are exempt from QR--economics, psychology and most science concentrators will never have to fulfill that part of the Core.

The requirement was added to the Core this year because Faculty members say a quantitative course fills a gap in the College curriculum. All Core classes are designed to teach ways of thinking, in addition to the individual topics addressed by each course.

"People need to learn how to think quantitatively--we do live in a technological age," says Henry Ehrenreich, Clowes professor of science, who chaired the Core sub-committee on the sciences last year. "We need to understand the numerical ways of expressing trends which have to do with society in a general way. It's very reasonable to add this requirement."

The professors for the four classes currently offered describe their goals differently. Some say that that it is important to put mathematical concepts to use in the real world.

"I think the QR tends to work very well when you combine it with another subject," says Robert S. Huckman, head teaching fellow (TF) of QR 24: "Health Economics." "It convinces [students] it is worthwhile to learn the ins and outs of statistical analysis."

Professor of Statistics Carl N. Morris, who teaches QR 32, also focuses on real-world applications of statistics in his class.

"The course emphasizes statistical issues applied to real situations (science, law, advertising, experiments, surveys, probabilistic reasoning, forecasts, etc.)," he wrote in an e-mail message. "It teaches students about statistics in a way meant to be applicable in the student's daily lives and to their courses."

The other two QR classes, QR 22: "Deductive Logic" and QR 28: "The Magic of Numbers," focus on understanding abstract mathematical principals rather than applications.

"To understand the world, one doesn't need heavy math, one needs to be able to understand how to make sense of numbers, how to deal with quantitative info," says Loeb Professor of Social Sciences David M. Cutler, who teaches "Health Economics."

An Even Field?

Those who took the classes offered this semester included first-years who can no longer fill the requirement with a test alone, sophomores who failed the test last year and others who used the Core classes to fill concentration requirements.

Because students came to the courses with varying levels of math skills, the pacing of some courses was a challenge, professors and students say.

"Deductive Logic," for instance, threw together a mix of students who were fulfilling a Core requirement and those seriously interested in the course. The class was once offered by the philosophy department and is still required for philosophy concentrators. Both students and teaching staff noticed the situation.

"My experience was that a lot of the students were sophisticated math students, but lots of students were not prepared for the level of work required [but] found it quite fun and challenging and satisfying," Head TF Anthony B. Corsentino says. "The feedback was that it was more difficult then they expected a Core course to be."

Though QR 24 dealt with some complicated material that may have been beyond the mathematical background of some of its students, Huckman says the teaching staff was able to adjust to the varying abilities.

"[It makes] it a challenge to teach in some cases because of a broad range of student abilities," he says. "At the same time, a lot of times students who aren't applied math majors seems to do very well with understanding concepts. I was pleasantly surprised to see a more uniform ability."

Damian J. Moskovitz '01, who is not a philosophy concentrator but took the course because he found it interesting, said that some students found the math-intensive class difficult.

"Personally I found it not too difficult, but I saw a lot of students struggling in the class," Moskovitz says. "I think some people learned a lot; other students were just lost."

But other students say they found their QR classes unchallenging.

"I really enjoyed it [The Magic of Numbers], but I did find it pretty easy," Caleb J. Beyers '03 says. "A lot of people I know thought it was easy."

Reaching Goals

And while some students say they coasted through the courses, QR professors fear the courses are not fully meeting their mission of teaching statistical analysis.

"I worry that we probably should take some of our students a little farther then we're taking them," Arnold Professor of Science William H. Bossert says. "In the 21st century, without quantitative skills, you'll be conned."

Core classes are notoriously easier than their departmental counterparts.

For instance, Bossert says that the computer programming course he will be teaching this semester, QR 20, is basically "a watered down CS50."

Other professors and TFs say that although the classes do not emphasize the mathematical processes and equations that were once tested on the QR examination, students can learn more from learning general concepts.

Though the QR classes are not as difficult as Math 25 or some of the statistics classes that first-years can take in their place, Faculty members say they are only working if they make sure students learn the skills they need for the real world.

"We do hope that the students who just finished are prepared to identify some invalid claims and to think differently about quantitative issues," Morris says. "If they have, they can continue to train themselves via issues that arise in their daily experience."