Giving credit where credit is due

Don't you love 'gut' classes? The ones with unofficial names like "Rocks for Jocks" or "Physics for Poets?" They're the easy classes people use to pad their schedule and to get quick credits. Overworked engineers with pre-med minors need them to preserve their sanity when confronted with a schedule filled with Organic Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering. Lazy students need them so they can graduate without doing any real work.

Princeton has a love-hate relationship with gut classes, recognizing that they lend themselves to abuse, while fearing that their disappearance would make life unbearable. Not surprisingly, those who choose not to indulge in taking gut classes often feel very resentful towards those who take too many. And rightly so. All of our diplomas are made less special if some Princeton students can graduate doing less work than students at far less prestigious schools.

However, don't blame the guts. The real root of the problem is not in the classes that take advantage of our system — it is the system itself. Princeton needs to join the rest of American universities and switch over to a system where graduation requirements are based on a credit system assigning weights to classes based on their difficulty. This would be a fairer system for all Princeton students, and renew the validity of taking a couple easy classes, because it would be impossible to take too easy a schedule and still graduate. Leaving the current system as it is opens loopholes for slackers, and gives headaches to the hard-working.

My assumption is that Princeton places equal values in the courses it offers because it wants to suggest that all subjects are equally worthy of study. This is absolutely true; all subjects are indeed equally worthy of study. However, all classes are not. There is no reason that a six class-hour per week (minimum) introductory Chinese class should be worth exactly the same amount as a glorified study hall. If students choose to take difficult classes, they are more or less forced to fill their schedule up with easy ones just to have the time to work on the difficult ones. Thus a culture of 'guts' has grown around the courses that have a reputation for being easy, creating a loophole out of getting a real education. Another problem arises when a professor — usually one new to teaching the course — abruptly decides to reverse the course's reputation as a gut. The class turns out to be very hard, and all the students suffer together. In that situation, lazy students end up unhappy because they are forced to work, and those already overworked are put in even more dire straits. I have had first-hand experience with the latter, and believe me — it hurts.

For once, there seems to be an easy way to make our guts disappear. Adopting the credit system as almost every other university has would eliminate most opportunities to abuse the system, and end the unfairness associated with gut classes. If every class was assigned a different value based on its difficulty, there wouldn't be such an obvious way to take advantage. A slacker would be forced to take an unbearable amount of easy classes (or actually enroll in some hard ones), and overachievers could get away with taking only a few difficult classes that they enjoy.

Some point to inherent unfairness even in a credit system, and they are right in that it is not perfect. Some classes would invariably be assigned a number not representative of credits, which might provide another way to take advantage of the system. However, adopting the credit system would undeniably be a step towards total fairness, not away from it. The credit system would probably have a small margin of error if a few classes were assigned an unrepresentative number of credits, but our current system is completely unfair because not weighting classes at all in effect gives the easiest class as many 'credits' as the hardest. There could even be another 'suggested credit' column added to the course evaluation sheet given after the course is completed. Each student could evaluate how many credits he or she thinks the course should be given, unlike the vague "how hard did you work in this class" question. Like in our current system of course evaluation, there would be no incentive to fill out a credit question dishonestly because the students giving their opinion would have already taken the course.

The current system of unweighted classes has created a slew of 'gut' classes that are impossible to love, yet impossible to avoid. Not weighting classes only benefits students who are lazy, and the rest of campus is forced into following it only out of necessity. When a teacher decides to "do something about" his or her course being too easy, it hurts everyone at once. Especially with the recent revelations about Harvard's rampant grade inflation and subsequent ridicule of their system, it would seem prudent for our University to quickly correct a fault which is no less egregious.

Princeton should establish a higher standard of study, and save itself from the headaches and finger-wagging that might result from the flaws in our system making national headlines. We have an opportunity to create a fairer system, one that hurts the shirkers and helps the most academically inclined at our school. Assigning different weights to different classes would not ensure a completely fair system, but it would provide a system that cannot be worse than our current one. David Sillers is from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at dsillers@princeton.edu.