I can’t help my eyes from rolling into the back of my head as my teacher explains what a primary source is in my “Introduction to Western Civilization” class, something I’ve been taught repeatedly since the sixth grade.
While I don’t consider myself an intellectual snob, I’m a firm believer that there is a time for learning the basics. And for college students, that should be in the first two years of their undergraduate education.
For this reason, the university should make it a requirement that students finish their General Education by the end of their sophomore level. While such a change is being implemented, students should be encouraged at summer orientation or by academic counseling to fulfill their GE requirements during their first and second years.
Organizing GE courses this way would improve the academic quality of the undergraduate experience. Instead of spreading out their enrollment in GE courses during all four years, students should complete these requirements at a time that coincides with the requirement to declare a major, streamlining the transition from underclassmen to upperclassmen.
The most risky alternative to not completing required GEs before senior year is the threat of not being able to graduate on time. GEs are in high demand and cannot always be counted on to fit into a schedule of upper division classes. But the lack of a diploma is not the only thing at stake.
The intention of requiring students to take GE courses is to promote students to be well-rounded. But in working toward specific degrees, students need to be able to maintain focus on their particular area of study.
As a student works toward attaining a degree, their educational experience should become increasingly specialized and mature in nature. It does not make sense for a fourth-year student to take an introductory class.
Most GE classes are designed to be instructed and graded at a freshman or sophomore level. When an instructor faces a range of students from all levels, it makes it difficult to create a syllabus and a fair grading standard that can be applied to different levels of educational experience.
Associate Professor Brian Walker’s syllabus for “Introduction to Political Theory,” which can be taken as a GE course, even asks students to be understanding if the class seems to be at a lower or higher level than they are comfortable with.
It is to the advantage of incoming freshmen to use GE courses as a tool to explore their academic interests at the beginning of their undergraduate experience. Having the possibility to take courses from such a wide array of disciplines can be a blessing to those entering UCLA without any sense of direction and can also make those with set minds evaluate their options.
During my freshman year, I took the “America in the Sixties” GE Cluster. It made me, a pre-med student at the time, realize how much I enjoyed the literary and historical aspects of the class.
Now that I am currently a second-year American literature and culture student, I think it’s safe to say that taking a GE class early on in my UCLA experience prevented me from pursuing a path that wasn’t right for me without it being too late to make a change.
Think GEs are a drag? E-mail Cody at ccody@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu.