My parents have always told me that I can be anything I want to be. Obviously, my parents have never taken a weed-out course at Duke.
With an extraordinarily high proportion of hyper-motivated students and some cruelly difficult introductory courses, Duke is all too often a junkyard of broken, abandoned and dysfunctional dreams. Take a bus over to East Campus and ask any freshman what they’re studying. Statistically speaking, there is a 50 percent chance you will be enthusiastically informed that you are speaking to a future doctor. Wait a year, then find that same student and ask them again. Although this sophomore might give you the same answer, note the hollow tone of voice, the purplish circles under the eyes, and the slightly hunched posture associated with carrying a backpack the size of a small freshman. Wait a year, then ask again. You are probably no longer speaking to a pre-health student.
The term sends a shiver of dread through even the most determined students—a “weed-out” class, or an introductory course, designed to be unjustifiably demanding in order to separate the students that truly deserve to pursue a given major from the inferior “weeds.” It is not just idealistic pre-med freshmen that are scrambling to reevaluate life-long dreams after a first semester collision with organic chemistry or calculus. This label is increasingly being applied to intro classes in the humanities, leaving many students wondering if there are any safe choices of majors left at Duke. After all, if it’s not to intimidate students out of a major, why else would there be classes in which the average on the first exam is a 30 percent? Believe it or not, some professors are defending their motives, claiming that they are just trying to help students learn. Which everyone knows is preposterous.
Despite the widespread belief that some intro classes are becoming unrealistically hard, some professors say the opposite is true.
Dr. Mark Rausher, professor of Biology 102, said that over the thirty years he has been teaching, he has tended to simplify his curriculum, rather than make it more difficult. And in response to those who say that these classes are unnecessarily hard, many professors believe they might actually serve a purpose.
Elizabeth Vigdor, professor of Public Policy 55, pointed out that it’s better for students to know what they are getting themselves into from the beginning rather than finding out in a panic during their junior year. Furthermore, for the students that do have pre-medical aspirations, these classes can act as a litmus test.
“A student’s success or failure in these courses may reflect some combination of the desire, aptitude and capacity for hard work that is necessary to pursue a medical career,” wrote Richard MacPhail, a Chemistry 31 professor, in an email.
At this point, I was a little confused. They’re not really saying that these classes are…good for us, are they? It appears so. Professors are aware of the labels their classes have received, and although they may not agree with them, don’t expect them to change anything in order to compensate any time soon.
“Could I make the course easier? Sure," Vigdor said. "Should I? I don’t think so."
Ironically, the problem may not be the professors. We might be doing this to ourselves. Or rather, to each other. It’s the hyper-competitive atmosphere created by the students, not the professors, that accounts for much of the stress of weed-out classes. Granted, that may be doing us a favor too.
“The simple fact is that far more students want to be doctors than can be doctors,” Rausher wrote in an email.
If students think that classes will get easier once they move on to further education, they will be in for a second rude awakening. Some argue that it’s not fair for non-pre-med students in Chemistry and Biology classes to be subjected to the same inflated level of competitiveness and grade consciousness.
On the other hand, Stephen Craig, professor of Chemistry 43, believes that students pushing each other constructively benefits everyone.
“That peer group-dynamic is one of the things—if not the biggest thing—that makes Duke the special place that it is,” the Chemistry 43 professor wrote in an email.
But maybe there’s one more point that needs to be made. Regardless of how we feel about it in the throes of our third all-nighter of the week, we came to Duke to be challenged. Although we pray for the greatest test of our time management skills to go to Shooters, Metro 8 and Mt. Fuji in the same night, we are here to learn.
“The whole game of an undergraduate education, no matter what field, is to learn the intellectual discipline of using models to break a very complex phenomenon—the economy, or an ecosystem, or a work of art—into manageable pieces that we can actually work with,” wrote Professor Connel Fullenkamp, professor of Economics 51, in an email. “If we don’t do that, we just end up spinning our wheels intellectually.”
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