According to most Faculty members, allowing AP science classes to take the place of higher level Harvard ones leaves those students who to take advantage of this option at a disadvantage.

"Because people come from a diversity of high school backgrounds," Ehrenreich says, "some have classes equivalent to ours, but nowhere do you find equivalent teachers involved in research. The are real experts, far greater than those in high school."

"Basically, the AP tests are what we would consider high school-level science and math, they are useful only for placement--not for credit--in most cases," Michel says. "Students in the sciences take much more rigorous courses in math and sciences."

Mean, Mode and More Math

Yet, for the class of 2003 there is a new Core requirement which some Faculty members say will help balance out the curriculum and better prepare graduate for the modern, technological world.

Both the CRC and a student committee that studied the undergraduate requirements in 1996 suggested that a Quantitative Reasoning course requirement be added to the Core curriculum. In May 1997 the Faculty approved the suggestion.

Though students and the campus press reacted with groans to an additional non-concentration requirement, Faculty members say it is absolutely necessary in today's day and age. Filling the requirement with a simple test is not enough, they say.

"We were concerned about adding more classes. We didn't want to expand the requirements but we felt it was needed," Verba says. "There is almost nothing in the contemporary world that doesn't revolve around understanding statistics, probability, and inference. It's really an important area to make as an area of education."