Seniors Petition for Core Class Credit

About 300 juniors and seniors have petitioned to receive Core credit for departmental courses this year, according to administrators in the Program in General Education.

The surge in petitions reflects the difficulties that some students that have remained in the Core curriculum are facing in trying to find classes to fulfill their graduation requirements, said Director of the Program in General Education Stephanie H. Kenen.

“We were actually surprised by the volume [of requests],” she said. “In some ways, I think there may be some sense of being stuck with an old curriculum.”

According to Kenen, about 90 percent of seniors and 50 percent of juniors are still in the Core program.

Kenen said that while the Program of General Education has attempted to assign Core designation to many new Gen Ed courses, the College has been accommodating in accepting petition requests during the transition from the old Core curriculum to the new Gen Ed program.

“While we want students to fulfill the obligations of the curricular parameters that were set for them, there’s a limit to the pedagogical benefits to forcing students in their second-semester senior year to take courses that they have no interest in taking,” said Kenen. She added, however, that the College “wouldn’t let them just take anything.”

Professor of History Emma Dench said she thinks that juniors and seniors who are still on the Core are limited by dwindling course offerings.

“For students who are still on the Core, there aren’t a huge amount of options,” she said.

Samantha R. Go ’11, an Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrator, petitioned to get an East Asian Studies course to count for her Historical Study A Core requirement last spring.

“I didn’t find any of the Hist A courses listed in the catalog particularly interesting,” she said. “I wanted something more relevant to either what I was studying, ESPP, or relevant to my research, which is in China.”

Go said she encountered little difficulty in getting her petition approved.

“Because the Core was being phased out, it was easier than it would have been otherwise,” she said. “They were pretty flexible.”

On the other hand, Joseph D. Hiatt ’11, an Anthropology concentrator, said he was unsuccessful in his attempt to get Anthropology 2000: “Osteoarchaeology Lab” approved for his Science B requirement this past fall.

Hiatt took the course anyway, but said he had to take Science of the Physical Universe 20: “What Is Life? From Quarks to Consciousness” simultaneously to fulfill the requirement.

Though Haotian “Sam” Fang ’11 said he has not felt the need to petition for Core credit, he said he thinks the rise in petitions can be attributed to dissatisfaction with a program that is being phased out.

“Seniors are just fed up with the Core,” he said. “They have this mentality of ‘Why don’t you just let us off?’”

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.