Harvard Poised To Eliminate Option To Take Gen Ed, QRD Courses Pass-Fail

Faculty of Arts and Sciences professors expressed broad support at a Tuesday FAS meeting for proposals to eliminate the option to take courses fulfilling the Harvard College General Education and Quantitative Reasoning with Data requirements on a pass-fail basis.

The proposals would amend the Harvard College student handbook to remove the option for undergraduates to take one of their four required Gen Ed courses and QRD course pass-fail. The amended language would apply to incoming classes starting with the Class of 2029, but requirements for current Harvard students would not change.

The proposed amendments received unanimous approval from the Faculty Council. The FAS will hold a final vote on the proposals at a subsequent faculty meeting.

Psychology professor Fiery Cushman ’03, who co-chairs the Gen Ed program with Anthropology professor Jason Ur, said removing the pass-fail option would help restore the Gen Ed program to its rightful place as the “crown jewel of a student’s education.”

“Having nearly every student take one of their classes pass-fail leads students to see the Gen Ed program as a bothersome set of requirements to get done with as quickly as possible and with as high a grade as possible,” Cushman said.

In opening remarks advocating for the proposal, Cushman said the share of students who elect to pass-fail one Gen Ed course has ballooned since the option was introduced in 2018, from less than 10 percent of Gen Ed students to somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. He added that there are now individual Gen Ed courses in which up to 40 percent of students take pass-fail.

Under the proposal, students could still elect to take a Gen Ed course pass-fail, Cushman said. However, students would not receive Gen Ed credit for such courses.

Several faculty praised the proposal at the meeting. Classics professor Kathleen M. Coleman, a former Gen Ed co-chair, said it would allow the Gen Ed program to better fulfill its goals.

“Not permitting pass-fail focuses attention on the mission of the program: to face problems students will face in their lives,” Coleman said.

“This will really help the intellectual vitality of Harvard,” she added.

But Math professor Noam D. Elkies opposed the proposal, saying it would be unreasonable to expect Gen Ed courses to play a central role in undergraduates’ education and that viewing the program as the “crown jewel of education” is “wishful thinking.”

The change, he said, would be futile.

“Recognizing that many students don’t want to be there, don’t expect it to be as meaningful as it should be,” Elkies said.

The QRD proposal — which was introduced by Statistics professor Joseph K. Blitzstein, who chairs the QRD Committee — received no questions or pushback.

In his remarks, Blitzstein said the change would boost the academic rigor of QRD courses and align the requirement with others at the College, such as the mandatory Expository Writing and language courses, which cannot be taken pass-fail.

Blitzstein added that students should direct more focus toward QRD courses because they cover a breadth of disciplines in one class.

“The requirement requires that you develop mathematical, statistical, and computational skills. The emphasis is on ‘and,’ not ‘or,’” Blitzstein said.

The two proposals come amid a broader effort to bring Harvard students back into the classroom and recenter academics at the College. Earlier in Tuesday’s meeting, the FAS overwhelmingly voted to update the Harvard College student handbook with new language that instructed students to focus on their studies.

The amendment was proposed by a recent FAS committee report on classroom norms, which found that students “do not prioritize” their classes, instead investing their time in extracurricular clubs and athletics.

And in October, the Gen Ed program updated its guidelines in an attempt to curb grade inflation and standardize grading across classes.

After discussion of the QRD requirement concluded, Human Evolutionary Biology professor Daniel E. Lieberman — who chairs the department — presented a proposal that would change the name of HEB to Human Biology, Behavior, and Evolution.

Lieberman said that the current name often confuses prospective concentrators and employers, who think the concentration only deals with human evolution, as opposed to the study of biology and behavior through an evolutionary lens.

Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Scott V. Edwards said the change would help clarify the scope of the concentration.

“This makes it much easier for students to know what they’re getting into,” Edwards said.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.