The Intimidation Barrier

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 of doing poorly to risk taking a music class. A few changes to Harvard’s academic policies could lower the barrier of taking such risks and encourage students to explore interests beyond their chosen fields.

The 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.

Consequently, most departmental classes–especially those that don’t count for Cores–never see students from far distant concentrations. When I whimsically decided to take two English classes, I suspected I would be one of the only non-humanities students in my section. I was right. Both times.

If more departmental classes counted toward the new General Education requirements, more departmental classes would have students from a real variety of concentrations. Much lip service has been paid to this idea by the Gen Ed Task Force, but improvements have remained laughable. It still makes the front page of this newspaper when the Gen Ed Standing Committee approves another six classes to meet its requirements. If any substantial change is going to happen, that number needs to be in the high hundreds.

The prospect of being a newcomer in a room full of experts—who have taken tutorials and actually read the books being casually referenced in class—would also not be so very intimidating if it weren’t for the reality of grades. The importance of grades, GPAs, and the appearance of one’s transcript should not be dismissed as an unfortunate consequence of putting competitive students together. Grades matter—a lot—when it comes time to apply for law school, medical school, a fellowship, a job, or virtually any post-graduation endeavor. Choosing particular electives to avoid the risk of too many unnecessary Bs and Cs may not be idealistic, but it can hardly be criticized as unwise. The pass/fail grading option, however, could be better used as insurance to allow students to take appealing classes they would otherwise see as too much of an academic risk.

Students in pass/fail classes should be allowed to switch back to letter-grading until near the end of the semesters, as is done at Columbia, where students have until the ninth week to decide. The current deadline for changing grading at Harvard is the fifth Monday, at which point students still have little idea how they well are likely to do. So students who have chosen to take a class pass/fail for “insurance” are then forced to take the “pass” on their transcript, regardless of how well they do.

Conventional wisdom has it that too many “passes” suggest a lack of academic rigor, meaning many transcript-conscious students dare not take more than one or two pass/fail classes in their four years. Allowing students to switch back to letter-grading late in the semester means that the “insurance” can be used more frequently and also gives students an incentive to continue to work hard in pass/fail classes in which they find themselves doing well.

Modifying the pass/fail option this way would not mean allowing students to hand-pick the grades on their transcript. First of all, it would not change the fact that a student must get permission to take a class pass/fail to begin with. Second, students would not know their grades when making their final grading choice, as the deadline would still be before final papers and exams. And last, such a change would not imply that the reverse could be done—students would not (and should not) be allowed to change a letter-graded class to pass/fail at the end of the semester.

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 it.

Melissa Q. McCreery ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a chemistry and physics concentrator in Quincy House.