"There are a lot of things wrong with sciences at Harvard," says Anne H. Beaudreau '01, a biology concentrator. "It's a pressure cooker environment with people going against each other."

Based on the enrollment rates from the last few years, Beaudreau is not alone in her complaints. Every year students begin two-semester science or math sequences without completing them.

This year, over 60 students--almost 20 percent of the class--decided not to take Chemistry 7, "Principles of Chemistry," following its precursor Chemistry 5, "Introduction to Principles of Chemistry." Almost half of the students in Mathematics 1a, "Introduction to Calculus," and Math 21a did not return to take the second installment of the courses in the spring.

Beaudreau blames many of her problems on the typically large class sizes in introductory courses and on the policy of teaching math in sections. In both instances, students have little contact with professors and find themselves at the mercy of teaching fellows, who range from inspiring to unintelligible.

Beaudreau complains that students have no control over this situation, and that when she approached an administrator in the math department with her problem, she was rebuffed.

"She was really nasty and it stopped me dead in my tracks," Beaudreau says. "It shocked me that she was admitting that there were bad TFs but that I was stuck with it."

To Be or Not to 22b

First-year math students single out Math 22 as a particularly unfulfilling course, citing the textbook, disorganization and a lack of curricular focus.

Enrollment dropped from 52 students in the fall to 18 in the spring, according to the Office of the Registrar.

James P. Chen '02, who is also a Crimson editor, has elected not to take Math 22b this spring.

"The class wasn't what I expected it to be," he says. "The biggest problem was the textbook...[Also] there wasn't really a logical progression of topics, at least in my mind. I got the feeling that the course didn't really have a focus; not even the professor knew where he was going."

Chen also says the course assumed too much prior knowledge.

"There was a time in the middle of class when the professor stopped his lecture and asked how many of us had seen multivariable calculus before," Chen says. "About half of us raised our hands, and this surprised me because it seemed from the reaction of the professor that he assumed we all knew it."

Many of the problems cited by students stem from the shifting curriculum of Math 22. According to the math department, the course was originally designed to complement the physics honors sequence, but now has more of a math base.

The transition period, which is only now coming to a close, has caused several problems, including an unclear focus and an outmoded textbook, according to Course Assistant Alex H. Saltman '00.