Say you're in your biology class and your neighbor asks the professor, "What's a phylum?"
The Undergraduate Council of Students, in its infinite wisdom, is petitioning the University to lift the restriction on Banner that prevents a student from registering for a class if he or she has not taken the prerequisite courses. They claim that this is an effort to protect Brown's vaunted "New Curriculum" and preserve the ideals of academic and intellectual freedom that are the very essence of our University.
However, what UCS is proposing threatens to destroy the very source of the freedoms we enjoy. The "New Curriculum" is not merely freedom for the sake of freedom - rather, it is an effort to free the students at Brown from the need to take courses in which they have no interest.
The thought behind this innovative approach to learning is that, when armed with the power to take only those courses he or she chooses, the student will take more ownership of his or her studies. I seriously doubt that when the Curriculum was conceived and proposed, students had any ambition to jump into courses of study for which they had not been fully prepared, simply because they could.
Now, a quick survey of the course catalog on Banner will reveal that most of the courses requiring prerequisites are in mathematics and the sciences. As a literary arts concentrator, I do not pretend to know the plight of the chemistry or neuroscience concentrator. But it is obvious that prerequisites protect the integrity of the upper-level classes in those disciplines.
The prerequisite courses for a class are merely shorthand for the concepts needed to fully appreciate a course - in order to proceed effectively, one must have a mastery of these concepts. Surely one would not presume to take organic chemistry without a cursory knowledge of chemical reactions.
Extreme examples for the sake of rhetoric aside, it is imperative that these benchmarks for study remain in place. Professors of these high-level classes are among the best in their respective fields; at an Ivy League institution we should expect no less. They do not want their time wasted explaining concepts that an over-ambitious student should have learned in a prerequisite class.
Additionally, those patient students who have taken prerequisite classes and mastered the "building block" concepts are enrolled in higher-level classes in order to expand their knowledge of a certain topic. They would not want their time wasted as the professor is forced to explain a concept that a student skipping prerequisites should have learned beforehand. Would you?
Now, this isn't to say that all students must be forced to follow certain programs of study simply to fulfill checkboxes on their transcript. That indeed would be against the spirit of our delightful "New Curriculum." But there are already measures in place to allow students to skip introductory classes if they can prove a mastery of needed concepts.
For example, incoming freshmen can use their AP scores as indicators for placement. For those who didn't take the AP test, there is a placement exam. In literary arts, enrollment into intermediate and advanced workshops is done on the basis of a submitted writing sample. These measures have long preserved the quality of classes above the basic level.
Granted, there are no placement tests to get into, say, PHYS 0170. This is where it gets potentially dicey. Students interested in the class would have to physically meet with the professor and prove a mastery of the concepts on which the class is based. Professors at Brown are reasonable people; they teach here, after all. I'm quite sure that upon meeting with a prospective student and being assured that the student knew the prerequisite concepts well enough, he or she would gladly enroll the student, overriding Banner.
The true issue at stake is whether or not we as students wish to take the time to protect the integrity of the learning environment we pay so much for. Prerequisites help ensure that the higher-level classes remain just that. We should be wary of freedom for freedom's sake, lest we lower the high standards that make Brown an environment of rigorous learning and academic enrichment.
Mike Johnson '11, a literary arts concentrator from New Jersey, plans to take MATH 2720: Multiple Dirichlet Series next semester. He can be reached at Michael_Johnson (at) brown.edu
