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Student Leaders Report
A Look at the
Freshman Year:
The Science Core and Class Size
The Task Force on Student Life and Learning identified improving faculty-student relations as a big need at our Institute. By and large, students don't know much about the life of a faculty member, nor do most faculty know much about student life.
It is my hope that this column will be the beginning of a regular look into student life issues at MIT. Sometime in the near future, perhaps I'll try to explain why students are so enamored with a residential system which most outsiders see as bizarre, or why some students have recently gotten upset with the athletics department, or how the tradition of hacking enriches student life.
For this first column, though, I'd like to address the perennially hot topic of the MIT freshman year academic experience. This is an issue that nearly every member of the MIT community has an opinion on and feels passionately about. Rightfully so - the freshman year truly shapes the entire MIT undergraduate experience.
Currently, there are a handful of Institute committees examining various aspects of the freshman year. Professor Charles Stewart of the Political Science Department is chairing a committee on the future of Pass/No Record grading and Advanced Placement credit. There's another committee whose task is to implement experimental programs around the freshman core, including those proposed by last year's Educational Design Project.
As I see it, these committees aren't really getting to the heart of the matter. To do that, we must examine the basic causes of our problems.
Some in the faculty have told me that they believe the current P/NR system makes students lazy and inattentive in class, and shoot for the old tradition of the "gentleman's C." Others assert that AP credit is among the reasons students are unprepared for more advanced subjects. Still others say that if we inject some excitement into the edges of the freshman year, around the science core, the ills of the freshman year will be cured.
All of these contentions, of course, have some truth to them. But I believe that we are still only nipping at the edges of the real problems. The real problems, as I see them, are these:
A central problem that I hear about from freshmen and upperclassmen alike is the perceived lack of coordination of classes in the freshman core. Part of this means that freshmen don't see how the core subjects influence each other. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that freshmen don't all take the same subjects: some come in with credit for Calculus I, others take biology instead of chemistry, etc. Programs like Concourse attempt to unify the curriculum, but these programs affect only a minority of each year's incoming class.
Another part of this, though, is that freshmen even more often don't see the connection between the core classes and things that they care about. A step in the right direction is the new Media Lab freshman year program, where students have their science core recitations together, with an instructor from the Media Arts & Science program providing context to the material, relating it to technical innovations.
Finally, we run into the somewhat-related problem of these science core classes as doppelgangers: trying to be both core classes as well as introductory classes for their department. Physics serves quite different purposes for physics majors and for management science majors.
The other central problem is that many freshman classes are just too big. Rooms like 26-100 and 10-250 hold many hundreds of students. Walk into a large lecture class on any given day, and you'll see students asleep, or doodling, or daydreaming, as well as the majority of the students frantically scribbling down everything the professor says or writes on the blackboard.
What's happening here? It's not that MIT is admitting lazy students, or non-interactive students. Rather, it's that we're conditioning our students to be passive learners. We're telling our students to sit and listen, then go home and work through some heavy calculus or chemical structures. This is a suboptimal way to learn. Students who are not engaged in the material do not learn it and retain what they learn nearly as well as in active learning.[See Teach Talk.] We owe it to our students – the future leaders in academia, industry and government – to provide the best education possible.
This conditioned passive learning affects more than freshman classes. Students behave in the same manner in upper-level subjects, and even in some small HASS classes. I'm sure you've taught a class where you felt it was like pulling teeth getting most of the students to participate. It's because of this conditioning.
I believe that in the same way, large freshman classes condition for poor student-faculty relations. It's very difficult for students to approach the lecturer in a n-hundred person class. The faculty are seen as intimidating. Often, this is eventually overcome by relationships with UROP mentors (and occasionally in traditional advising settings), but in the meantime relations suffer.
I'm not trying to belittle the hard work put into these classes by such passionate instructors as Professors Don Sadoway and John Belcher. Most of these problems are completely independent of their hard work. Sometimes I have to remind myself how much worse the freshman year could be if these great teachers weren't around.
Currently, we as an Institute have two special opportunities to make positive changes in the freshman year, one of new resources and one of new ideas. Alex and Brit d'Arbeloff's generous gift of $10 million provides us with the financial resources to innovate in the first-year curriculum. And, later this term, a faculty member from your ranks will be appointed the next dean for Undergraduate Education.
Work with this dean. Allow the dean to have true power over the freshman year. Rally your fellow faculty to forget the Institute's "sacred cows" to take advantage of this unique time. The true curricular power at MIT lies in you, the faculty. Let's remake the freshman year so we can truly declare that MIT is the world's greatest educational institution.
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