No need to increase difficulty of university’s science GE requirements
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 15, 2010 9:21 p.m.
As a North Campus student who religiously reads the Daily Bruin, a column came to my attention. (“Science GEs pose little challenge,” April 7).
In the column, the author laid out a plan for including science core classes in UCLA’s General Education requirements. While I understand the reasoning of the column, I thought I should bring up some conflicting ideas on why I believe the current GE requirements fulfill my university education just fine as they are.
The author explained that the General Education requirements laid out by the university “don’t serve as a way for North Campus students to push their limits by taking a science class.”
First, let me lay out the definition of science. Merriam-Webster states that science is “Knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, especially as obtained and tested through scientific method and concerned with the physical world.”
Is that not what we do in social sciences, or even pushing it further, theater or film or performance?
For example, we get inspired from daily life (observation), write a script (hypothesis), perform it to audiences (experiments) and then we get results (reviews or box office numbers).
From there we can make general laws and theories (for example: People like romantic comedies or prefer action thriller). Cannot everything humans do be seen as a way of exploring knowledge through the scientific method?
To further this idea, who gets to determine which science is more “science-y” than the others? How is the class Introduction to Statistical Reasoning not science-related?
Even in the strictest definition, there is quantifiable data, hypotheses, graphs and laws, all fundamentals of any scientific research.
As a third-year North Campus student, I often wonder if it’s not the science students who should be taking more North Campus classes.
Perhaps if that were the case, some of the disasters of our times could have been avoided.
For example, if science students were required to take a “Science Ethics” class, or an “Art in the Third World” class, perhaps that would change the thinking from “What can science do?” to “What should science do?”
Furthermore, I test this author’s idea of a “challenging course.” As an elite university, all students have gone through the same screening process, and all have been recognized as superior.
However, superior does not mean that we are all physics whizzes.
In fact, this university recognizes many forms of superior talent. They recognize superior artistic talent, top athletic achievement, the ability to be keenly socially aware and obviously, they recognize scientific excellence.
If this author wants to include a curriculum that would force some to enter a “fish out of water” scenario, then perhaps Football 101 or Painting 1A should be added to the General Education curriculum.
It is my impression that this school offers a wide-ranging spectrum of study for General Education in an attempt to cater to the different learning styles of each student.
They offer writing courses for science students like the Writing II requirement DNA: Promise and Peril, or for an avid writer, Introduction to the Study of Language. A challenging course for one person could be an easy “A” for another and narrow thinking is not going to change that.
Science majors are just as guilty as choosing easy North Campus classes as North Campus majors are of choosing easy South Campus science classes.
The truth is, we learn differently, we are interested in different things and no amount of university-required curricula is going to change that.
Horak is a third-year world arts and cultures student.
