Veritas

Editorial: Where credit is due

Looming registration for next semester’s courses invites conversation about how we choose classes. The process requires us to manage a number of different (and sometimes competing) aims: pursuing our intellectual interests, maintaining GPAs, fulfilling major and distribution requirements, and allowing enough time for activities beyond school work. One of the best ways to perform this balancing act is to keep the Credit/D/Fail (Cr/D/F) option in mind.
Last year’s Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) President and Vice-President for Academic Affairs promised to reevaluate the Cr/D/F policy during their tenures, floating ideas about pushing back the deadline until after students had received graded feedback. In last spring’s BSG election, the Orient endorsed current BSG President Sarah Nelson, who included a similar proposal in her platform. Pushing for Cr/D/F amendments is a frequent campaign pledge, and one that many students support, but the policy remains unchanged. BSG currently has a proposal to extend the deadline for taking a course Cr/D/F until the ninth week of classes, which the Recording Committee may consider. We support these changes.
Taking a course Cr/D/F is not an inherently lazy decision or a way to opt out of trying in class. Liberal arts education is predicated on a broad range of intellectual exploration; removing the disincentive of a potentially bad grade is invaluable in getting us to take unfamiliar courses.

Editorial: Feedback loop

With less than three weeks left in the fall semester, the final push is upon us. And though we’ve known about many of these final assignments since the first day of classes, these last papers, exams and projects never fail to induce panic, culminating in December’s all-too-familiar—and almost always over- caffeinated—frenzied final sprint. What we produce in these last three weeks represents, in theory, a demonstration of a semester’s worth of lectures, readings and assignments—a synthesis of all we’ve learned. Yet we tend to dispatch these completed assignments into a void, abandoning them as we pack our bags for our long-awaited break.
Currently, there is no official policy for professors handing back graded finals and papers. And though some do offer students the option of turning in final work along with a self-addressed envelope, or encourage them to collect assignments at the start of the following semester, this is far from the norm. More often than not, the quality of our final work is reflected in the course grade alone; students rarely ask for—and thus miss out on—constructive feedback.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that grades are irrelevant, or that the hard work we do throughout the semester is reflective of pure intellectual zeal. Grades are powerful external motivators. But this reality does not negate the fact that learning for learning’s sake is folded into our work as well. We benefit from working on these assignments, and we owe it to ourselves to bring the process full circle.

Editorial

This piece represents the opinion of The Bowdoin Orient editorial board.

November 15, 2013

One week ago, the staff of the Harvard Crimson ran an editorial embracing a new trend in higher education—the growing number of students choosing to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) fields over the humanities. “Let them eat code” is currently the top-read article on the Crimson’s website, with 80 comments as of press time. The editorial applauds students who choose these more “rigorous” fields, characterizing the knowledge and skills gained through study of these disciplines as more practical in our ultra-competitive economy. Scholars in the humanities, they write, are of little importance because with or without them, people will still have access to literature, music and philosophy.

“Why spend four years listening to lecturers warn you that you can never really know anything?” asks the piece. We can’t help but note that this is neither an unenlightening nor a novel concept; Socrates argued that “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

And while we do not believe that four years spent reading Woolf and Hume and Shakespeare is a waste of time, the strength of a liberal arts education is, in part, its breadth. Bowdoin’s new Digital and Computational Studies Initiative proves that the two disciplines are not mutually exclusive; for one final project in the inaugural Gateway to the Digital Humanities class, two students are learning code to build a website that archives the history of art at the College. These classes prove that the disciplines are not only valuable in and of themselves but as complements to one another.

Institutions like Harvard and Bowdoin value learning for learning’s sake. We wonder how the Crimson’s editorial staff managed to overlook this reality in favor of this strange utilitarian and functionalist position.

Every year, students graduate from Bowdoin with degrees in English and Religion and Psychology. Somehow, few of them are homeless; most of them have jobs. These degrees do translate into marketable skills, but we feel that in choosing a liberal arts college we are opting for an education that provides us with more than just a job at the end.

In exploring both the sciences and the humanities we gain skills for life as well as skills for work, in the process reminding ourselves that the two are not always the same. Only the most robotic among us would reduce every class to the value it adds to one’s future earning potential, or assert that academic inquiry into art and literature adds nothing of value—quantifiable or otherwise—to a life.

The editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of Claire Aasen, Erica Berry, Nora Biette-Timmons, Marisa McGarry, Eliza Novick-Smith, Sam Miller and Sam Weyrauch.

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