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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES Quantitative Reasoning Joins Core
Starting this fall, courses in quantitative reasoning will be required as part of Harvard College’s Core curriculum. Plato would be pleased. "QR" is as old as Plato’s Academy and as modern as the latest demographic study, election poll, or computer program. "It’s not possible to exist in the modern world without encountering a number of situations that require this mode of reasoning," says Anthropology Professor Peter Ellison, who will teach one of the new Core courses. Students will learn about pure and applied aspects of mathematics. By extension, they’ll be mastering logical patterns of thought. The new requirement was put into place after extensive discussion within the Faculty of Arts of Sciences. "Mathematics has been the handmaiden of philosophy since written records began," says Ellison. "So how one could purport to teach modes of reasoning and thought without teaching QR seemed strange. A number of people felt this way, and enthusiasm grew for making this change." "Where would Socrates have been without Pythagoras?" Ellison asks. "The traditional liberal arts curriculum, from the Greek Lyceum, involved understanding mathematics. All our paradigms for what constitutes truth and how it is established draw from mathematics." Benedict Gross, the George Leverett Professor of Mathematics, who will teach a course on number theory, elaborates. "What is a proof? What is a demonstration of something? What is a refutation? What is a contradiction? These are all notions that came out of mathematical thinking." The new Core area honors an older tradition. But it also addresses a modern need for savvy about data. "The fields of statistics within each of the sciences have grown very, very fast," says Gary King, professor of government. "Economics has econometrics, political science has political methodology, psychology has psychometrics, sociology has sociological methodology, the biological sciences have bioinformatics, history has cliometrics. In all these fields, and others, scholars have learned an incredible amount by using and developing these methods." Harvard alumnae also have reported a need for quantitative thinking skills. In 1997, the Core Review Committee convened two meetings to canvass graduates about the QR requirement. Susan Lewis, director of the Core Program, says, "These students had gone off and discovered that they needed to have some understanding of statistics. They needed to be able to understand orders of magnitude. They needed to be comfortable in conversations with technical people. And they simply couldn’t have predicted when they graduated that these were things they should have learned." The eight new Core courses replace a test that was previously required of all freshmen. Until this year, QR was taught as a "method without a subject matter," says Ellison. Freshmen were given booklets to help them prepare for a test on data analysis and computer programming. (The computer part was phased out in 1992.) "The test was like the driver’s test we all take," says Gross, who also co-chairs the quantitative reasoning subcommittee of the Core Program. "You memorize the booklet, you go in, you take the test, and two weeks later you forget most of what you have learned." The new Core courses, however, embed quantitative ways of thinking in specific subjects. For instance, in Ellison’s course on Counting People, students will generate a full demographic analysis of a country and study its implications. They will determine birth and death rates, population distribution according to sex, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic standing, geographic density, and patterns of migration. "And we will try to help people think about how population issues affect the current world, from population growth, to environmental effects, to public health, to issues of public policy," Ellison says. In the course Health Economics, taught by John Loeb Professor of Social Sciences David Cutler, students will do graphical analysis, algebra, and surveys to understand the medical care system – its strengths and weaknesses, and the nature of the market for medical services and health insurance. Students can also learn mathematical methods to improve their decision-making; use probability and statistics to understand uncertainty and risk; learn about algorithms and write computer programs; and master the principles of deductive logic. "A lot of students have a fear of mathematical reasoning, perhaps because they were exposed to it in a rather dry and uninspiring way," says Eric Maskin, the Louis Berkman Professor of Economics, co-chair of the QR subcommittee. "The hope is, with the development of exciting courses, they’ll see that the subject is first of all interesting, and possibly of direct practical importance to them." Students concentrating in math, the sciences, and some of the social sciences will be exempt from the QR Core requirement. About 600 other students, however, will take QR courses, says Lewis. The subcommittee hopes to eventually offer 12 courses each year.
Copyright 1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College |
