<p>This question was asked of current students previously, but never answered. The MAP seems rather rigid when compared to other schools' distribution requirements. Comments from current students appreciated.</p>
<p>Ok, that's all well and good...but what's the question?</p>
<p>The ? is how did students like/not like the MAP, classes worthwhile, relevant, well aaught or not?</p>
<p>Most people try to get the MAP requirements out of the way freshman year. The general consensus is that they're not fun and most of the time they don't help your major. Just something that you have to bear with, I guess.</p>
<p>MAP is annoying as hell. Most people hate "Writing the Essay" with a burning passion, but I was lucky enough to like my class since the people in it were cool and the professor wasn't too bad, so i ended up liking it. ConWest was pretty interesting because I'm really into philosophy and i also loved my TA. Natural Science and the math requirement annoyed the crap out of me though. Luckily, I had taken AP Statistics in senior year (didn't take the AP test because I was lazy and didn't feel like paying $80) so I was able to get by with skipping every lecture and only attending the class on quiz/test days. World Cultures was somewhat interesting, but required a LOT of reading, which got time-consuming.</p>
<p>I, for the most part, really like the idea of the MAP. I find it ridiculous that some people can get through college without taking at least one writing class, one culture class, one science class, and one math class.</p>
<p>In effect, I like the fact that everyone has to take:</p>
<ul>
<li>math: if you can't at least balance your checkbook, you have a problem.</li>
<li>science: scientific illiteracy is a big problem in America; that's why you have these ridiculous debates about evolution being "a theory," etc.</li>
<li>World Cultures: I feel like a lot of people don't realize that there's more to thought, art, and culture than American W. European</li>
<li>ConWest: too many people have no idea about the history and ideas that were the genesis of American and Western thought.</li>
</ul>
<p>Writing is crucial to modern life, but I think Writing the Essay is mostly useless. Expressive Cultures and Societies and the Social Sciences are interesting, but not entirely useful. I have mixed feelings about requiring foreign language - I think it's a great idea, but I also understand why some people hate it.</p>
<p>I know this is a bit off topic, but evolution is a theory. Unless you can go back whatever billion million trillion years and actually prove evolution, it is still considered a theory.</p>
<p>limeJasper: It's a theory, just in the way that gravity is a theory. You probably can't go back a billion million trillion years to actually prove it. :D</p>
<p>I was referring to people who espouse the viewpoint that "I have my ideas, and you have your radically different ideas." I don't know many in the mainstream public who argue that there are alternative ideas that explain what causes apples to fall from tree branches when their stems break and why our solar system doesn't just fly apart into space.</p>
<p>Simple. The answer is awesomely powerful being who lets us live because of his/her whims. According to South Park, this being creates life and sadness along with it just so he/she could take it away.</p>
<p>I'm with you on liking the idea of MAP. I'm glad I went through those classes, but I'm not gonna lie..the process of getting to the other side is extremely painful and annoying =p There are going to be a lot of days when you have fifty pages of reading, and you don't feel like doing ANY of it. But agreeing with shades_children, I also advocate the idea that everyone has to have some kind of background on each of those subjects. Math/science are practical and thus essential, whereas the culture/language(for CAS) courses really point you in the direction of expanding your mind. Americans have this tendency to be narrowminded in the sense that they can't seem to think outside the bubble that is this country. I'm so often surprised at how ignorant people can be, and I think NYU does an excellent job of trying to make its students more worldly and aware of what's actually out there, especially with its huge study abroad program.</p>
<p>do all of the colleges within nyu require map?</p>
<p>All the nyu colleges require some form of core curriculum...it differs from school to school. "Writing the Essay" is required across the board, except for Gallatin. Stern, Steinhardt, and Tisch have to take two semesters of writing the essay. I really have no idea about the smaller schools, like social work, though.</p>
<p>shades_children, the "theories" of gravity and evolution are hardly of one and the same kind. With regard to the effects of gravity, they are, for all practical purposes, instantaneous, as well as visible, consistent, and regular. The same cannot be send of macroevolution, which is really the best possible explanation to the development of life that a modern scientist has come up with. The case is definitely not closed in that regard. So, yes - evolution is, then, a THEORY. My bigger complaint is with people who don't want an open debate on that score.</p>
<p>In regards to the capitalization of evolution as a theory in the last statement a correction. For almost all biologists and the general scientific community evolution is a fact, meaning that it is illogical beyond any point to argue otherwise with whether or not it exists on all scales. HOWEVER, the mechanisms of evolution whether they be divinely driven or dictated by other natural means are theory. There is and has not been for many years any credible scientific debate over whether evolution is a fact.</p>
<p>The problem here is that there is not a distinction being made between established evidence of "microevolution" and "macroevolution."</p>