Which is your least favorite class?
I really like all of my classes. Well, except for this one
Harvard is the crème de la crème of colleges. But still, there are some disappointments. The food is normal college food, your roommates still wake you up when they come in from a night of partying, and there are just some classes that you don’t like.
Harvard students shared some of their lackluster experiences with us.
PJ, 18, 2019, Economics
CS 50 is structured in a way I don’t find is particularly well-suited to learning CS. There should be a larger focus on section time and section work as opposed to lectures. And a lack of emphasis on syntax and language skills helps to learn the theory of CS, but makes coding into a sort of Frankenstein-like mess – things like Scope and Constants just won’t quite make sense to those without a background.
Ruben, 18, 2019, Undecided
Some of my gen-ed classes aren’t as engaging as I’d have hoped.
Anonymous Junior
A couple of entryway economics classes. They were just dry.
Dylan, who otherwise chose to remain anonymous
Expos 20. It’s just a lot of work.
Chinaza, 18, 2019, Biology
My freshman seminar. They play it up a lot before classes even begin as a really great experience which I think forces a lot of students to pick one because they don’t want to miss out on the Harvard Experience. There are different types of learning and some foster to your type of learning more than others. It feels more like sitting there and listening to other people throw information at you.
Anonymous Sophomore
CS 50. It’s too gimmicky. I feel like I can never get help during office hours.
Anonymous Freshman
My problem has been with GOV 20: Comparative Politics. My PAF and a few other upperclassmen raved about how great the class was, and more or less advised me to take it freshman year because it would solidify my interest in pursuing a gov concentration. Now that I’m more than half way through the course, it’s done the exact opposite — pushed me away from gov as a concentration. The sheer amount of the reading in that class prevents you from truly engaging with the material. In the event that the discussion sections functioned more as a debate, where you were expected to do the readings outside of the class and come ready to argue either for or against them, it would force engagement with the material outside of class.
Instead, students can get by with skimming the reading and getting the bulk of the material taught to them by their TFs. Also, the head lecturer has a speciality in cases involving Slavic nations, simply because that’s where the bulk of his academic work has been focused. However, on a comparative level, this is a crutch that he uses to prevent from delving too far into nations that he isn’t that knowledgeable about.
We brushed over the Arab Spring when talking about social revolutions and spent almost three lecture periods focusing on Russian Revolutions – on which there was probably over 800 pages of reading that adequately covered the topics. Ultimately, I’d be more pleased with the course if the discussion sections were restructured to act as debates, and if the lecture periods were spent covering some of the material that the readings do not cover in detail.
Adele, 18, 2019, Social Studies
My seminar, Beauty and Christianity. You read the text, but people don’t put a lot of effort into it because it’s pass/fail, and the professor just lectures a bit, and the conversation doesn’t go any further. Anytime we go off track a bit, the professor jerks it back. It feels like we never talk about beauty in Christianity. There’s no actual discussion in the course; we just answer the question and move on.
Not to worry. The overwhelming majority of people we talked to were perfectly happy with all of their classes.