Double-credit courses

HUM and Integrated are both double-credit courses, which comprise a sequence of classes that lasts the whole of a student’s first year on campus. HUM 216: Literature and the Arts I and HUM 217: History, Philosophy and Religion I introduce students to a historical, philosophical and linguistic interpretation of the entire Western canon, from “The Iliad” to Dante’s “Inferno.” The following semester is similar in structure but takes students through the latter half of Western civilization. Meanwhile, Integrated takes on the hefty responsibility of teaching its students physics, computer science and chemistry. Though students have the opportunity to drop the class after the first semester, the academic and time commitment comprises, at a minimum, enrolled students’ first semester.

After spending two lectures and two precepts a week with the same five professors and 50 students, the HUM community can grow pretty close. The same can be said of Integrated — students spend arguably more time together than HUM students due to lab work and problem-set collaboration. To review, positives for these courses: multiple tenured professors teaching a minimum amount of students, interesting course material and a novel interdisciplinary approach to understanding a diverse curriculum.

And yet, 25 percent of HUM students who took the sequence the first semester opted to discontinue the class for the second semester. A similar percentage of students dropped Integrated. Though the workload for these two classes is intense, this is not the primary reason students report for deciding to drop the course. Most students register for HUM and Integrated knowing the time commitment, so this is not a reasonable explanation. Instead, it is an issue endemic to the structure of the classes themselves.

In the case of the HUM sequence, the amount of material to be covered obscured the true purpose of the course — to take an interdisciplinary approach to the Western canon. Students devoted their time, per the direction of the class, to reading every minute detail of, for example, “The Republic,” in one night. The class discouraged students from making larger connections between the readings and instead impelled students to focus on the choice of wording within the specific passages themselves. As a result, students lost the opportunity to understand how the works fit into the context of Western civilization. Further, precepts were often stifled because students could not write their papers on topics even remotely addressed in lecture or precept.

Students in Integrated experienced similar frustrations. Because the students were inundated by the amount of work in each individual sub-section of the class, they failed to make connections between, for example, how a line of programming in Java could be used to solve a problem in quantum mechanics. According to some students who took Integrated, they did not have the opportunity to learn chemistry, one of the goals of a double-credit course. This problem was exacerbated by the amount of time students had to dedicate outside of the classroom to labs and problem sets. As freshmen, adjusting to this level of time commitment further prevented students from really grasping the material. Many students who dropped Integrated last semester are taking the component classes that they were to have learned in Integrated now, such as COS 126: General Computer Science.

Both HUM and Integrated can incorporate some simple reforms to make the classes more interdisciplinary and meaningful for their students. For example, if HUM were to cover material only in the Greco-Roman time period during the first semester, students would have a greater opportunity to concentrate on the overarching themes between the books. HUM should have instilled a greater sense of the values of Western culture through the various readings and assessments. If the papers in HUM required an in-depth analysis of the books and their applicability to Western culture, more interdisciplinary learning could have been incorporated in the course.

The Humanities Sequence and Integrated Science represent an earnest effort on the part of the University to encourage interdisciplinary learning. The same principle is echoed in the ecology and evolutionary biology program and in the Wilson School, and most notably in the senior thesis. However, by reforming the Humanities Sequence and Integrated Science to be less ambitious with the quantity of material and more ambitious with the quality of interdisciplinary learning, Princeton students could achieve this goal much earlier in their academic careers.

Elise Backman is a freshman from Sea Bright, N.J. She can be reached at ebackman@princeton.edu.