Don't be an academic woos

It's rather sad, in a way, that the number-one school in the country graduates hundreds of students each year who don't know a foreign language or the basics of calculus. Give students a loophole, and who can blame them for taking advantage; after all, we have singing groups and other self-important activities to worry about. So pardon us non-Group IV majors if, for the past three years, we chose to Credit/D/Fail anything that required problem sets.

Strange as it may sound, many students come to Yale to take the easy road--at least as far as mathematics and the sciences are concerned. Not only does the broad Group IV requirement reduce the burden of taking, say, an actual lab, but the many Group IV classes that cater specifically to non-majors ease the pain for the numerically impaired.

Throw in a whopping eight Credit/D/Fail options, and you could cruise your way to a B even if you read the paper in class everyday. This actually happened year after year in professor Timothy Goldsmith's class, "The Biological Roots of Human Nature." That's why Goldsmith led the way last spring when the faculty decided--beginning with the class of 2001--both to reduce a student's total Credit/D/Fail options to four and to limit the number of Credit/D/Fails a student could use to one per distribution group.

The days of sleepwalking through that Group IV requirement are no more. And, while more than half of the class of 2001 will still be baffled by the simplest of derivatives and integrals by graduation, the reduction is a rare administrative step in the right direction. A Yale degree shouldn't come easy. But there's another gaping loophole among the requisite steps for earning a bachelor's degree: acceleration.

If undergraduates took advantage of Credit/D/Fail to breeze through math and science, what happens with acceleration can only be termed exploitation. Never mind that accelerated students steal spots in seminars or loaf abroad for a semester. Again, who can blame students for capitalizing on loopholes, especially if it saves their families a semester's tuition or enables them to go overseas? The point of contention is not with the students, but with the policy.

After one semester here, any freshman could tell you that her AP course in say, history, doesn't hold a candle to a class at Yale. There are vast differences in the amount of reading: Yale's book per week vs. high school's pages. There are also vast differences in essay structure: a narrow and tight thesis vs. some compare-and-contrast bullshit. And have you seen a Yale final exam with 100 multiple choice questions?

Nothing's wrong with using AP tests to place students in higher-level classes. But allowing good scores on these exams to count as full-fledged Yale credits is inappropriate. Graduating from Yale should mean passing 36 classes at Yale; passing 30 classes and being a nerd as a senior in high school shouldn't cut it. Graduating early becomes a lot less of a feat when it's done by some other means than cramming four years of work into a shorter time span.

One wonders what Yale has to gain with its acceleration policy. Less crowded junior and senior seminars? No. More tuition money? No. Good thing for the bursar that Theo Huxtable isn't the only one who understands how much the real world sucks; otherwise accelerated students would fly out of here in three years and save a bundle.

But by giving students promotions through means other than actual coursework at Yale, the acceleration policy serves only to undermine the rather straightforward notion that one should pass Yale classes to get a Yale degree. In short, it gives undergrads another easy way out, which is fine by us--but for the number-one school in the country, it really shouldn't be the case.