Group IV Guts: Stress out or Cop out?

BY CINDY LO

LEO SHKLOVSKII/YH COURTESY WWW.STONEYSBEER.COM This one goes straight to the gut

At the dawn of every semester, as diligent Yalies make their way back to New Haven, a familiar and long-suffering friend anxiously awaits them -- their class schedules. While certain students will heartily embrace this familiar welcome-back greeting, always close in thought, others may feign ignorance or refuse. Vague recollections of learning, scholarship, and erudition flood our minds and we delve into the course-selection process.

For those of us who aren't pre-med and haven't planned out the next 10 years of our higher education, the matter of fulfilling Yale's distributional requirements inevitably leads to discussion about fulfilling the three required Group IV credits. Enter the significant number of Yale students majoring in the humanities, who have adopted the familiar rallying cry of, "But I'm not a science person," students who wince and recoil when they hear the words 'group' and 'four' in the same sentence. Yet for the sake of entertaining Yale's graduation requirements, these non-science majors peruse the blue book, scour the Course Critique, and grill fellow non-science major friends about which Group IV for 'non-science' majors they should consider.

"When I started this course seven years ago," said Professor Roman Kuc, the instructor of The Digital Information Age, better known as EE101, "I wanted to teach a service course to non-technical majors, some of whom would one day be sitting in Congress and voting on the research budgets of technological programs."

But how can we account for the widespread aversion to all things science at Yale? And what keeps science majors relatively immune to grumbles about the lack of humanities courses designed for non-humanities majors?

"Many people seem to believe it is easier for a science student to succeed in an introductory humanities course than it is for a humanities student to succeed in an introductory science course," Professor Michael Frame, who is the lead lecturer for Fractal Geometry, said. "I don't know what evidence supports this, but I've heard it for the quarter-century I've been teaching," Why do so many students suffer from this Group IV-phobia? Perhaps they have been traumatized by high school experiences with science courses, many of which are not imaginatively taught and are steeped in rote memorization. A recent study has found that a standard high school biology text contains more words with foreign Greek roots than the foreign words found in an introductory Spanish language textbook. Perhaps students are turned off by a subject that may seem overly technical.

According to Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Professor William Summers, "genuine interest in science" exists in all but a few students (in whom it has been entirely extinguished by early negative experiences. "It is the challenge to reach out to such traumatized students and re-kindle genuine interest in science," Summers said.

Is it wrong to combine science with other fields of studies in a way that may be much more accessible and of personal interest to non-science majors? Does the science in such a course somehow become 'less scientific,' less worthy of a Group IV categorization? Art major Katie Kokontis, DC '04, said, "I take art, and music, and theatre classes. MCDB 110b, The Biological Roots of Human Nature, was definitely a science course, but one which presented the science in a way that could be engaging to say, an art major." Perhaps there are simply some fields of inquiry that don't fit into these groups perfectly. Four is a relatively small number in comparison to the 2,000 or so term courses Yale offers each year.

According to Dianna Lee, BK '04, "The content covered in E-Commerce [a Group IV course] was definitely more 'Group III.' Sure, computer and encoding components were taught in some lectures, but none were so technical that you'd need to be a computer science major, or anything even close to that, to understand and do well in the class. But it shouldn't be considered a gut course -- what you learn and the grade you earn is reflective of the amount of effort you put in. That's standard."

It seems logical that the intellectual rigor of a course, regardless of its distributional group, is to a large degree determined by the student taking the course. A check by the Credit/D/Fail option, combined with a student's refusal to input anything above a C- effort, will effectively render any course a "gut." Thus it appears that if we are to truly receive the liberal education that Yale so proudly guarantees, we actually have to go out and achieve it.