Since its launch in the fall of 2009, the Gen Ed program has dramatically altered the landscape of course offerings at Harvard College. It replaced the 32-year-old Core Curriculum, which will be phased out at the end of the next academic year.

The General Education Office has approved 397 courses, including 91 “new or significantly revised” Core or department courses, according to Tez Chantaruchirakorn, who is program manager of the Program in General Education.

Students must choose from these course offerings to fulfill eight requirements in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and math.

The Gen Ed curriculum is meant to “connect in an explicit way what students learn in Harvard classrooms to life outside the ivied walls and beyond the college years,” according to the program’s website.

While humanities and social science classes have largely been able to embrace this mission, a number of indicators show that the sciences are lagging behind.

Data from the Q Guide—Harvard’s course evaluation tool—suggests that science and math courses have struggled in the shift from Core to Gen Ed.

Humanities and social sciences classes designed for Gen Ed are scoring higher on average than past Core humanities and social sciences classes.

Not accounting for overall changes in teaching quality across the College, Q scores for humanities and social science courses have jumped from an average of 3.82 in Fall 2007 through Fall 2008 for Core classes to an average of 3.93 among courses numbered in the Gen Ed category in the first three semesters after the new program officially launched.

On the other hand, math and science Q scores saw no significant improvement in the transition from Core to Gen Ed, moving from an average of 3.56 to an average of 3.60 over the same periods.

Although this data only reflects student perception of course quality and may change in upcoming semesters as professors refine new courses, anecdotal evidence from faculty members also suggests that science Gen Ed courses have not lived up to the program’s mission in the same way that humanities and social science courses have.

“I think the science areas were really not thought about nearly as creatively as some of the other areas in Gen Ed,” said Chemistry lecturer Logan S. McCarty ’96, former assistant dean of undergraduate education.

McCarty co-teaches Science of the Physical Universe 20: “What is Life?”

“[The creators of Gen Ed] didn’t really do a whole lot to change the view of what these science courses ought to be.”

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

One potential explanation for why science Gen Ed classes have failed to show improvement over science Core courses is that many professors have simply re-packaged their Core classes.