Lindsey Boermna
Staff Writer
Forgive me, Pepperdine, for spending two years here without knowing what I wanted to do with my life. Thank you, Pepperdine, for allowing me to graduate on time with the major I love. But forgive me, Pepperdine, for wanting to spend my senior year focused on my future without collapsing under the workload of unnecessarily hard General Education (GE) classes.
I understand that a Liberal Arts education creates well-rounded adults; therefore I welcome and appreciate the General Education requirements at Pepperdine. I also understand why these courses are challenging as it is congruent with our mission statement, but they are killing me. It’s bad enough I have to slave through my accounting minor (Thanks Dad), which, if you didn’t already assume, is hard-boiled boring, but throw a couple pretentiously difficult GEs in the mix and I’m sunk.
GE professors, we appreciate the intellectual expansion you provide, but chill out on the rigor. You don’t need to make a class excruciatingly difficult to get people to listen. Why is that the goal anyway? If attendance is mandatory, why isn’t that enough to educate a (usually small) class of students? If people aren’t paying attention, one must wonder if this class is effective enough to be a requirement in the first place.
After the grade inflation scandal a few years back, (UC Berkley Law School ranked Pepperdine 106 out of 120 undergraduate programs in 1999 because of grade inflation), Graduate schools are already skeptical about high GPA’s coming out of Pepperdine, yet GE courses remain irrevocably difficult, which weigh heavily on the final transcript and stress students out immensely.
In my Religion 301 class, every student was asked what their hardest class at Pepperdine was. 20 out of 32 students said, disdainfully, their hardest class was a GE requirement.
Pepperdine requires 22 (55-56 units) General Education courses be completed to graduate. That number is significantly higher than almost all of the top ten Liberal Arts Schools in the nation according to the U.S. News and World Report, and the flexibility is significantly lower as well. William’s College (Ranked #1) offers students Winter Study Programs, which is graded Honors, Pass, Perfunctory Pass, or Fail, so students can explore new fields at low risk, concentrate on one subject that requires a great deal of time, develop individual research projects, or work in a different milieu. (www.williams.edu) Doesn’t that sound refreshing?
The inflexibility of Pepperdine GE courses affects seniors most. I am writing for two TV shows, the Graphic, being mentored at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and working part time at an accounting firm, giving me just enough time to barely pass my GEs and graduate with a lousy GPA. I don’t mind, but I’m sure there are business majors out there who would rather study for the LSATs than spend hours combing through Western Heritage or biology majors whose lab time is cut short by early 20th century theology.
The focus is on education, not frustration, but GEs are blurring that notion especially now that schools are more competitive. Simply put, I just don’t care enough to take time away from what I love to do, and I will not compromise myself just to fill a requirement. This is a choice we all, sadly, have to make at Pepperdine, which could easily be mitigated with more flexibility. But until that day arrives, GEasies remain a dream deferred.
09-07-2006
