Dartblog

Even though certain members of the administration soft-pedal today’s oversubscription woes, or assert that the problem has been with us for all time, there are still unhappy parents and students out there:

I am a Dartmouth parent with a child who graduated a couple of years ago. I am also a Dartmouth alum, and I have been a very strong financial supporter of Dartmouth.

My son had to be creative in various ways to solve course oversubscription and scheduling problems. He was a dual math and engineering major.

At one point, he wanted to take Meir Kohn’s Economics 26 course, The Economics of Financial Intermediaries and Markets. Economics 1 was a prerequisite. Economics 1 was always oversubscribed during the time slots in which he did not have required courses. He solved the problem by discussing his interest with Professor Kohn, who waived the prerequisite requirement. Of course, my son was at a significant disadvantage because all of the technical material was new.

In another term, a required course for each of his majors was offered only at the same time. And there was no other term that one of these courses could be taken without delaying graduation for an extra year. My son talked the math professor into letting him take the math course at the same time as the engineering course, with the only classroom requirement being attendance for exams. Of course, it is very hard to get a grade higher than a B if you never go to class. As a parent paying $5,000 per class, I don’t think we received our money’s worth in this situation.

As for my son’s math professors, his experience was exactly the opposite of what the Development Department tells me when they are asking for money. Of his first seven professors, one was tenure-track, one was a one-term visitor, two were research instructors (post-PhD grad students), two were grad students (though one was very good in the classroom), and the last one was an adjunct (non-tenure-track) professor. Just because I list only six non-tenure-track professors out of seven does not mean that there were not others. It just means that I gave up counting at six.

Note: The above observations are backed up in a column in The D today by freshman Suril Kantaria:

The trend is clear: many students, particularly freshmen, often do not receive their first-choice class selections.

The significance of this column goes beyond the experience and the opinion of one freshman. The decision of The D’s Op-Ed Editor to publish the piece testifies to its relevance to many students.

Another Note: A second parent opines:

I’m the parent of a ‘10. There is no question that underprogramming of certain courses, or poor annual scheduling, has negatively affected my kid’s course selection process and his ability to pursue (or even sample) multiple major fields. His experience has involved similar “creativity,” usually waiving out of a prerequisite. As a result, he takes the course out of sequence, without the prior material as background. Bad idea, both as an introduction to a field, and in what he gets out of the course. This course programming/scheduling situation promotes a pre-professional, one-track approach to what is supposed to be a broad liberal arts education. This seems to occur in the Econ and Government areas and, I have been told, in Biology also.