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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]No college with zero general education requirements is interested in pushing anyone outside their comfort zone.[/quote]

First,Brown does have some general requirements.

Second, here's what happens in the real world at most colleges:

Jason wants to go to med school and Lisa wants to go to law  school. Both of them are really focused on getting as high a gpa as possible. So, they pick the easiest courses with the most lenient grading they can, especially for courses outside their comfort zones which they are taking to meet "distribution requirements."So, Lisa signs up for courses usually known as "Rocks for Jocks," "Physics for Poets," and Comp Sci 101-"How to Plug In Your Computer." (At most schools, she'll only need to take 2 of them.)

Jason has already taken AP Bio and got a 5. College policy is that he only gets credit for it if he takes the next higher level course and gets a B. Jason elects not to take the credit, and instead enrolls in Intro Bio. He already knows 90 per cent of the material extremely well, but he thinks that an A in the Intro course will help inflate his science GPA and help him get into med school. (After all, it's unlikely med schools will learn he took AP Bio if he does so.) He follows the same strategy in choosing his first chem course. He finds out which humanities courses the hockey team takes and signs up for those.(The courses and teams vary at different colleges.)

Lisa has heard that you can take a limited number of courses Pass/Fail "at the discretion of the professor."So,  having sat through "Rocks for Jocks" which was easier than any science course she's taken since 7th grade, she decides to take a more intensive---and interesting--science course Pass/Fail. That option proves to be a mirage because none of the profs who teach them permit that. (Ironically,  at some colleges the gut science courses are the only science courses that can be taken  Pass/Fail.)

If Lisa goes to Brown, she  learns that a  Rock Star prof teaches an Intro  Bio course.For years, it's gotten rave reviews.80 per cent of those who enroll are premeds and it's a tough course. Lisa signs up for it S/NC. She really  enjoys it. She has to do a lot of work to get an S, but she isn't worried that she can't compete for an A with the premeds. Taking such courses S/NC will not hurt her GPA for law school applications.

Something in the  course leads her to seek out a  geology course. At most colleges this would be  "Rocks for Jocks." The difference at Brown is that every student in the class  actually WANTS to take geology;they aren't just taking it for a distribution  requirement. Therefore, teaching the course is  not automatically  assigned to the most junior member of the department because nobody wants to teach a class made up mostly of  people  who have zero interest in the subject.

Jason at Brown decides to take the higher level bio and chem  courses because he knows that if he is in over his head, he can retake the courses.

Brown has studied student course selection for years. It turns out that the vast majority of students DO take a wide variety of courses,  but they often skip broad survey courses, e.g., they might take Russian history or  American  Diplomatic History rather than European History or US history.In  many cases, the students   were enrolled in  rigorous high schools where they already took survey-type courses in European History or US  History.

I  know I won't convince the PP,  but maybe other folks will realize that Brown's system does encourage students not to limit themselves to safe  choices.[/quote]

I'm a Brown grad, and this was my experience. I was a poli sci major, but I took lots of 200-level science classes because I could. It was also good in calculus, which was mandatory S/NC: I hadn't taken calculus in high school and because it couldn't be an easy A, the other students also hadn't taken it before, instead of it being filled with people who took it in high school, and that made it a better class for me.[/quote]

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