The Core

Thanks to the College’s Curricular Review, the Core Curriculum, that onerous set of requirements that has burdenered undergrads for a generation, will soon, finally, be extinct. But that’s of little help to you, fellow undergraduate, for you will be the victim of The Core at its worst, as, in its dying throes, it falls into disrepair, left to waste as professors turn their attention instead to bolstering the forthcoming general education requirements.

Before you can graduate and properly be called an educated Harvard Man or Woman, you must complete courses in seven of the Core’s eleven academic areas (Foreign Cultures; History A and B; Literature and Arts A, B and C; Moral Reasoning; Quantitative Reasoning; Social Analysis; and Science A and B). If it worked the way it was intended, the Core could force students to explore academic areas outside their narrow specialization and ensure that no Harvard student graduated without being exposed to a wide range of general topics.

Instead, the Core is often seen as seven obligatory piles of specific, useless knowledge to choke down. Far from expanding their academic horizons, many students trudge through the Core by taking whatever fits their schedule, doing as little work as possible, and adhering to the cram-and-purge school of exam-taking. The Curricular Review promises big changes to all this—eventually.

But until that day comes, use the Confi Guide as a primer on using (and abusing?) the Core, especially for incoming freshmen (and you juniors who still have six Cores left to kill).

Those of you who wish to use the Core as your gateway to academic experimentation are welcome to, though this primer probably won’t help you much (but then again, you probably don’t need its help). For the rest of you, start by revising the way you think about the Core. Instead of viewing it as something that has to be suffered and endured, look at the ways you can use it Core to beat it at its own game.

One fruitful but underused way of getting the most out of the Core is to use these required classes to significantly inflate your GPA. A Harvard sophomore once said the key to academic success was to “Work hard at concentration classes and fuck the gut Cores.” In other words, Core classes provide great opportunities to get easy grades without acquiring the stigma usually assigned to gut classes.

The big difference between Cores and department courses lies in the way the classes are approached and how coursework is graded. An essay question in a Core English or History class is much more likely to have a “right” answer than a departmental class, making it that much easier to study for. Easy Cores can be viewed as opportunities to juice your GPA with comparatively little effort (join a study group + memorize), instead of a chance to get by without doing much work. That’s almost as good as academic exploration, right?

If you want a top grade, all you have to do is put in that extra little effort. While most students do very little work still scrape by in classes like Science A-47, “Cosmic Connections” and QR 28, “The Magic of Numbers,” a little more effort will result in an easy A or A-. Ditto for your History and Lit and Arts courses.

In any event, the key to surviving the Core is planning ahead. It can bring misery to students who panic and take a Core class to fulfill a requirement, registering for whatever fits into their schedule at the last minute. Many Cores have an extremely specific focus, and might be bearable only for a similarly specific group: though you might fall in love with the confluence of cultural history and representations of space in Mongolian chant in your Lit and Arts C Core, don’t just take it on a whim because it gives you no class Thursdays. Many Core classes are not offered every year, so look through each Core area far in advance for classes that seem interesting (or depending on your goals, easy).

In sum, the Core is a killer only when it sneaks up on you. By planning in advance, we can all find interesting Cores with hot professors who grade easily, and then laugh at the poor bastards who didn’t read The Confi Guide.