Staying in the know

When spring semester rolls around, what we’ve learned in fall semester seems worlds away. We are ready to embrace new facts and new skills. We find ourselves looking at the course bulletin with fresh minds, searching for appealing classes. But all this newness comes at the expense of becoming detached from the knowledge we gained the semester before. For knowledge to be internalized, we need to revisit and reuse it, not to relegate it to the past once the final has come and gone.

Columbia can do more to encourage courses that build off of each other—that not only widen, but deepen the knowledge a student already has. Aside from Core requirements and the broad outline of required classes for a major, the specific courses we take and the sequence in which we take them are largely up to us. Such choice, while invaluable, can lead to a lack of direction—whether we are upperclassmen or still waiting to declare, we don’t always have a sense of which courses complement each other, both within a given department and between departments. The large variety of offerings makes it impossible to know which courses are the best for a holistic education. Columbia should begin to provide guidance in course selection, and implement an academic advising system able to rigorously ascertain our interests, analyze our semesters in themselves and in relation to each other, and suggest courses that would reinforce the knowledge we already have.

In fashioning a productive semester, we should be provided with an automatic appointment near the end of each semester with our advisers where they, not we, ask the questions. The focus must be not on scheduling, but on discovering courses that build on the knowledge we have gained. The best complement for Introduction to American Studies may not be a history course, but may instead be American Literature and Culture, an English course—and how interesting would it be to take a class on Medieval English texts after studying some of their Jewish counterparts in Medieval Jewish Cultures?

We need to be provided with syllabi, and not just equipped with (CULPA’s specialty) ­­­the knowledge of a teacher’s idiosyncratic habits and toughness in grading. For all this, Columbia must implement a more thoughtful and content-based system of course selection, which would provide us with the opportunity, if we chose it, to build off of what we already know.

In a similar manner, Columbia must rethink its finals system. Testing, despite its necessity in principle, is a relatively straightforward process of regurgitating material that becomes burdensome in students’ minds—and an exam should not be the final step in a student’s interaction with the semester’s material. Yet the current schedule, first a jam-packed three days of study time, then an onslaught of exams, and finally a much-needed break, leaves no time for thought and reflection; worse, it reeks of finality.

Alternatively, Princeton, among other institutions, provides its students with an extended break before final exams. I see significant value in providing students with the time to absorb material thoughtfully before being tested on it. A course’s backbone—its concepts and patterns—should be internalized at a semester’s end, and a mad three-day rush to the finish hardly allows for internalization. I also see value in preserving a portion of material to be taught after the final exam, because there should be no finality to the pursuit of knowledge, no exam to mark its conclusion. To allow for the extra week needed for the pre-finals break—for the time needed to truly learn—the academic calendar can be extended by one week in May. For the lofty goal that is education, Columbians can contribute five more days.

The fall semester over, I have been trained to approach this new semester as the beginning of a new year. Yet I know how much I learned last semester, and I am burning to use it, to expand it, to grow it. As an institution dedicated to higher learning, Columbia should be standing behind me.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.