Anonymous wrote:How open will vary

Look at U Rochester

Excellent school. The cluster system is fairly open. Basically,there are 3 ares: STEM, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Your major covers one area. You then need 3 courses (12 units) in each of the other two clusters. And for that, you pick a specific area and take courses within the "Theme"---but basically it's Pick Psychology and you take 3 courses (you can easily find a theme to support the courses you want).
FOr engineering, it's pick 12 units in one area and 8 units (2 courses) in the other (stem is obviously your major).

So it lets you pick areas you love and go more in-depth.

Outside of the cluster requirements, you take a freshman writing course and a sophomore writing course in your major and those are the only non-major requirements.

For example: my Engineering kid is taking 2 psychology courses and 3 dance courses. Nothing else required. So to them, the dance courses are nothing---they are just something she loves and would want to take anyhow (dances outside of courses 5-10 hours per week anyhow in multiple groups). The fact it can count for her "Core curriclum" is awesome and allows her to focus more on her core academics. She's selected 2 areas she is genuinely interested in, versus being forced to take an Eng, History, FL, some specific courses.
It also allows you to go more in-depth. For College of arts and science majors (who have a lot less major courses required than say engineering), it allows many students to do 2-3 minors or a double major and a minor. With 12 units, you are only 3-4 courses shy of a minor. So if you like the cluster (and you chose it), it makes sense to continue taking courses and get the minor.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This website is useful as a first pass to get a quick sense of distribution requirements. The higher the letter grade, the more requirements. It’s not trying to comment on the quality of those classes. It’s not always right, but in the spot checks I’ve done, it usually is.

https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/

That website is run by ACTA, the American Council of Trustee’s and Alumni. Per wiki:

“ACTA is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025,a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election.”

That explains A LOT about their scoring system.

Here’s what they say about their evaluation criteria.

http://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/rating-criteria#:~:text=and%20scientific%20systems.-,What%20Will%20They%20Learn%3F,%2C%20Mathematics%2C%20and%20Natural%20Science.

Apparently ACTA has been around since 1995. Just because authors of some misguided policies wanted ACTA’s input on one thing doesn’t mean the info they gathered on some other thing can’t be of value. Hyper polarization to the extent that an attempt to measure distribution requirements is demonized seems short sighted to me. Some very liberal schools get high scores (by their standards), some low, but the idea is to use it as a measure of the breadth of requirements in the groups of schools interested in. Maybe low scores is what you want if preferring fewer requirements.

I find it useless. Makes no distinction between a school where kids can use AP credits to satisfy the distribution requirements and those where they cannot. The first kind of school is effectively an open curriculum school for my kid, and (I expect) for many others from the DMV.

Brown and Wes

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This website is useful as a first pass to get a quick sense of distribution requirements. The higher the letter grade, the more requirements. It’s not trying to comment on the quality of those classes. It’s not always right, but in the spot checks I’ve done, it usually is.

https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/

That website is run by ACTA, the American Council of Trustee’s and Alumni. Per wiki:

“ACTA is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025,a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election.”

That explains A LOT about their scoring system.

Here’s what they say about their evaluation criteria.

http://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/rating-criteria#:~:text=and%20scientific%20systems.-,What%20Will%20They%20Learn%3F,%2C%20Mathematics%2C%20and%20Natural%20Science.

Apparently ACTA has been around since 1995. Just because authors of some misguided policies wanted ACTA’s input on one thing doesn’t mean the info they gathered on some other thing can’t be of value. Hyper polarization to the extent that an attempt to measure distribution requirements is demonized seems short sighted to me. Some very liberal schools get high scores (by their standards), some low, but the idea is to use it as a measure of the breadth of requirements in the groups of schools interested in. Maybe low scores is what you want if preferring fewer requirements.

It really is very personal to each student, I find my Brown student (and from what she tells me of her friends) are very adventurous in their class choices, but I think they look for indications of this when applying

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This website is useful as a first pass to get a quick sense of distribution requirements. The higher the letter grade, the more requirements. It’s not trying to comment on the quality of those classes. It’s not always right, but in the spot checks I’ve done, it usually is.

https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/

What an odd system of scoring schools. Oberlin and Vassar get an F. I don’t really see the value of this website as a source of info.

Schools with open curriculums or very sparse distribution requirements get a lower grade on they site. It can be debated whether the lack of distribution requirements is a good or bad thing; clearly the website believes it’s a bad thing. But if you know what you want and how to use the site, it can save a lot of time either way. A student searching for open curriculums could filter for D or F schools. A student searching for broad distribution requirements could filter for A or B schools. No other site that I know of tries to measure each school’s distribution requirements, so it can be a time saver, but the results of course need to be checked. If someone wants an open curriculum but is unwilling to use the site because the lower grade offends them, I think that’s perhaps an emotional reaction. You could just as easily flip the grades around in your head to gauge curriculum openness. I will say that my kid thought they wanted a totally open curriculum but are now glad to be at a school where they and their friends were nudged out of their comfort zones. Makes for more interesting conversations about new topics when everyone is exploring.

Anonymous wrote:
This website is useful as a first pass to get a quick sense of distribution requirements. The higher the letter grade, the more requirements. It’s not trying to comment on the quality of those classes. It’s not always right, but in the spot checks I’ve done, it usually is.

https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/

That website is run by ACTA, the American Council of Trustee’s and Alumni. Per wiki:

“ACTA is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025,a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election.”

That explains A LOT about their scoring system.

Anonymous wrote:
This website is useful as a first pass to get a quick sense of distribution requirements. The higher the letter grade, the more requirements. It’s not trying to comment on the quality of those classes. It’s not always right, but in the spot checks I’ve done, it usually is.

https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/

What an odd system of scoring schools. Oberlin and Vassar get an F. I don’t really see the value of this website as a source of info.

This website is useful as a first pass to get a quick sense of distribution requirements. The higher the letter grade, the more requirements. It’s not trying to comment on the quality of those classes. It’s not always right, but in the spot checks I’ve done, it usually is.

https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/

Anonymous wrote:Are you instate for UVA? There are two paths. Echols for Arts/sciences. And there is also one for engineering but I don’t recall the name.

In addition to no requirements outside of your major, you get priority registration with the athletes.

But Echols is not open to everyone; it’s very selective.

Brown is the only school with a pure open curriculum, with no requirements outside of those of your major.

At Wesleyan, you can graduate without completing any requirements outside your major, but to graduate with honors you have to complete three classes in each of three areas: arts/humanities, social sciences, math/natural sciences.

Smith has a similar distribution-based requirement for honors graduation and a writing requirement.

At Vassar, I believe you have to take foreign language.

At Hamilton, there’s a writing requirement.

Oberlin has some distribution requirements, but is otherwise pretty open. Not everyone can get into Brown or Wesleyan.

https://catalog.oberlin.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=52&poid=9123

General Course Requirements:
* Two Full Courses in Each College Division
* Two Additional Full Courses Outside Maximal Division
* Three Full Courses with the Cultural Diversity Attribute
* Two Courses with the Quantitative and Formal Reasoning Attribute
* Two Courses with the Writing Intensive or Writing Advanced Attribute

Sarah Lawrence College is pretty open with it’s curriculum.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a question that can be answered with a simple google search. Given the only open curriculum school you are familiar with is Brown, I suspect the other well known options may not meet your definition of rock solid. Having explored many of these schools with DC, in our experience they range from completely open to very open with a requirement to meet certain writing or computational analysis requirements which can be satisfied in a number classes across disciplines.

https://blog.collegevine.com/open-curriculum-schools-11-colleges-that-allow-students-to-direct-their-own-learning

This doesnt have Vassar, Carleton, Denison, Wooster etc

Don’t know about the others, but Carleton does not have an open curriculum.

^ easier than the ones already mentioned and listed.