The recommendations by the Task Force on Undergraduate Communication to amend the Institute’s writing requirement are a step in the right direction toward fixing curriculum issues, but don’t go far enough. The current requirement system is unquestionably broken; a student who crams vocabulary words for a few months to get a 670 on the SAT Verbal can spend four years here without taking a writing class, and it’s possible that the same student might not even know how to form a coherent sentence. Plus, courses such as Math Analysis I and Writing to the World Wide Web are deemed “writing intensive,” and satisfy that requirement, when anyone who has taken either of those courses knows that the writing involved is far from intensive. In fact, no one seems able to provide a concrete definition of what makes a class writing intensive.
The recommendations were presented to both the Faculty Senate and the Student Senate recently. Input from the student body as a whole, however, has not been sought on the matter. The Student Senate had an open forum for grade modifiers; it would help to see such an event covering the recommendations in the near future. The Faculty Senate is slated to vote on this issue in the spring, and unless such a forum is held the faculty will not be able to make an informed decision. This is a prime opportunity for the Student Senate to represent the overall mindset of the student body—an opportunity it should seize for the benefit of everyone.
The administration, however, should tread lightly before introducing anything new. They should take care to ensure that they don’t add additional burdens to various student curricula that are already full. In general, students are already restricted in their free elective options, and an additional limitation would be far more restrictive. The idea of a “freshman essays” course would further burden the workload for freshmen, too—and the Writing Center doesn’t even have the resources as it is to support such an endeavor.
One good aspect of the task force’s recommendation is the caveat that instructors must provide feedback on assignments; not teaching assistants. This will ultimately enable the faculty to enforce the spirit of the communication intensive initiatives, and ensure that the new requirements are effective.
The task force’s recommendations to amend the writing requirements are a step in the right direction, but more work needs to be done and more opinions sought before the system is perfect.
