<p>Hi. I'm interested in polysci and looking at Swarthmore. I've talked to a few current students who say they feel they're getting "the best education in political theory in the nation." I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas about specifics that would inspire that sort of confidence in students? Also, from talking to students at various selective colleges I'm surprised at how little writing they are asked to do. Maybe this is typical for college. I was wondering if anyone had any idea about the typical length/number of papers required in LA classes at Swat?</p>
<p>I don't know how you could prove "best in the country", but Poli Sci is definitely a strength at Swarthmore. It is the third largest department in percentage of majors, behind only Econ and Bio. Swarthmore produces more future Poli Sci PhDs per 1000 graduates than any other college or university in the country. In addition to academic/think-tank career tracks in Poli Sci, Swarthmore also produces a lot of future lawyers. And, Swarthmore grads are well represented in elected office, including the current ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, who graduated from Swarthmore at about the same time as Michael Dukakis.</p>
<p>Swarthmore is pretty solid across the board, but social sciences are probably the school's particular strength.</p>
<p>On paper writing: I don't know how anyone could give you an "average". The thing that struck me the most about my daughter's first year is how many papers were used as teaching excercises, where the professor would require first an outline, returned with comments, then a rough draft, returned with comments, and finally a final draft. This is very labor intensive for the professor, but a terrific way to teach students how to write academic papers.</p>
<p>My son is a rising sophomore and thinking of majoring in Political Science and possibly Philosophy. Political Philosophy is his favorite subject. He is very impressed with the department. The department head, James Kurth was in the list of most influential writers in America for 2004. Richard Vallely, a Swarthmore alum and poli sci professor at Swat has won national writing awards this year. There are many other professors who have won national recognition. Kenneth Sharpe, another political science professor works on national drug enforcement policy and often testifies for Congress.</p>
<p>My rising junior is an honors political science major/history minor. As an example, for one of the intro political theory classes, he wrote 3 papers, each having a length of 8-10 pages. In an upper level history class he wrote a 25 page paper using original sources. I think they do PLENTY of writing at Swat. He also said that his experience was not uniformally wonderful in the intro political theory classes. (He took more than one.) As you would expect anywhere, not all classes are created equal. Not all Swat classes are perfect.</p>
<p>For a social science class, you can usually expect to write between three and four papers (the total number will depend on whether the professor decides to make the final a paper or an actual exam). Depending on the level of the class, the first two papers are usually a little shorter (5-10 pages) and the third is often longer (15-25). Like interesteddad said, the page count doesn't necessarily indicate how much work you put into it, particularly in intro level classes which often require several drafts. </p>
<p>On the whole, I find that I write more/longer papers than a lot of my friends who go to other colleges.</p>
<p>What do you think of the teaching overall? Do you think from talking to your friends that the teaching is much better than other colleges, or do you have any idea?</p>
<p>I have had wonderful, quality professors at Swat, as well as some real duds. I think that's going to be the case no matter where you go. </p>
<p>I will say that, no matter the quality of the prof, I absolutely have more one-on-one contact with them than my friends at larger universities have with their professors. Professors will learn your name, and you can definitely speak with them outside of class. Many of my friends at universities have never spoken with their professors and have to deal with TA's. </p>
<p>I do think that Swarthmore puts special emphasis on encouraging professors and students to engage with each other. It's not just something they say in the brochure; the atmosphere actually supports it.</p>
<p>Another point...my cousin is going to Brown, as a freshman. The <em>smallest</em> class he is in will be something like 70 students...while the first year seminars offered by Swat (for example) only have 12 students.</p>
<p>This is also a good point. I am going to be a junior in the fall, and the largest class I've had in two years had 30 people in it. The smallest had five. You can pretty much expect this to be your experience at Swat if you're in social science and humanities classes. In the sciences, you can expect larger intro-level classes, but you'll still get plenty of small-group experiences and professor contact.</p>
<p>What does individual attention transform into learning-wise? I read an article that said classes at UMass taught the same things as classes at Amherst, for instance, but students at UMass had to pay better attention in class and readings to learn, whereas Amherst kids could ask profs questions and got more spoon feeding. I guess what I want to know is: do you feel profs push you to perform your best? Or do you say they're good profs because they're entertaining or nice?</p>
<p>The teaching style at Swarthmore is heavily oriented to student participation. For example, the 006 Physics seminar for first year potential Physics majors meets once a week in the evening for three hours. Each week, all 12 students in the seminar prepare problem sets for presentation to the class. The preparation includes a group study session (usually on a Sunday night) and one on one meetings with the prof. the day before that week's seminar.</p>
<p>Likewise, in social science courses, students are expected to not just read the assignment but to come prepared with questions or discussion points questioning the reading. Doing well in a course requires more critical thinking than just learning and regurgitating the material.</p>
<p>Here is an example from a Swat History Professor, Tim Burke. In his blog, he describes the major research paper assignment he plans to use for his "Images of Africa" course this semester:</p>
<p><a href="http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=20%5B/url%5D">http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=20</a></p>
<p>And, another, in which he blogs about how he chooses reading material for his courses:</p>
<p><a href="http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=63%5B/url%5D">http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=63</a></p>
<p>The exceptions to this approach obviously occur mostly in the few large intro lecture courses. Some departments have these, some don't. The approach varies a bit from professor to professor as well.</p>
<p>The importance of small-scale seminars to the Swarthmore teaching style dates back to the 1920's when the unique honors program was put in place. Under this system, students studied in depth topics in their department in seminars with a few students and a professor. After preparing four of these "topics" over the course of their final two years, honors students received written and oral exams from outside experts in the field. Thus, over time, this kind of individual learning has become a dominant theme in Swarthmore academics.</p>
<p>Timothy Burke sounds cool. At the same time, I've heard he's the best prof in the college, so they can't all be like this.</p>
<p>There are some pretty cool professors other than Burke as well. For example Schuldenfrei, Barry Schwartz, Kurth etc. But even the newer ones, for example my son's Econ professor (who is perhaps an Asst. Prof) who is new and started the year out being slightly mechanized and dry actually got into the rhythm of being at Swarthmore and my son enjoyed the class in the end. It might have something to do with the culture - of delving deep into a subject, of the class discussions etc. Same with his English Asst. Prof. Her delivery was also mechanical and she got into a lot of gender issues that my son thought were very PC and he did not enjoy it. But in the end, he thoroughly enjoyed the class. A) Because he loves literature. B) They delved into things which he loved and provided new insight into old things for him.</p>
<p>I am not saying that there aren't bad professors at Swarthmore. You could visit 'ratemyprofessor.com' to see comments on Swat professors.</p>
<p>Do you guys think the essays on <a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/wa/Alchemy/Alchemy%20Home.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/wa/Alchemy/Alchemy%20Home.htm</a> are representative of top Swarthmore student work? They're fairly well written, and the vocabulary is sophisticated, but at the same time the concepts aren't really any more complicated than stuff I was asked to research in high school. Doesn't mean they're bad -I'm just wondering.</p>
<p>Also out of curiosity, what is the difference between a class of 20 people and a class of 10? People affiliated with Swarthmore seem to feel there's a big difference. I'm wondering because at my hs, I had professors (yes, profs) who could teach a really lousy lecture-oriented class with 12 students, and some who could make a class of 25 seem really small (interactive and productive). A student on ratemyprofessors.com said that Burke was a good lecturer, but not such a great discussion leader, which makes me wonder how much difference small classes necessarily make. Another question: I talked to one person about the honors program, and they said the good thing about it was that it got students comfortable with reading professional lit. That's good, but I know other colleges have classes that emphasize that -could those of you who are students comment on other high points of the honors program?</p>
<p>Nina, I looked at the samples too. It doesn't look like high school stuff to me. If it is something you have already covered in HS, then I guess you don't need a college degree! Just kidding! :)</p>
<p>Oh, I'm not saying I've covered all of that stuff. I could understand most of it though. It's just that I went to a non-traditional high school where a lot of our classes mimicked college classes. My favorite history prof, for instance, required about 6 6-8 pg research papers a semester. As just a rough guess I'd say the best papers for his class were comparable to those online Swat samples. One year, a kid turned in a 50pg, trilingual research report for the final paper!:)</p>
<p>As to your question of the difference between a class of 10 versus a class of 20, well, my son who goes there says that Swat students are very academically oriented (aka nerdy) and are forever asking questions. The difference between a class of 10 versus a class of 35 is, at 10, this is manageable. At 35, you have people who will get irritated with the class. He wanted to take a class on Existentialism last semester but dropped out of it for that reason - it was so popular that more than 35 took the class (I think 37), and he felt everyone was aggressively pursuing their own agenda and he was irritated with that.</p>
<p>Nina:</p>
<p>I'm not sure that you fully understand the educational style at Swarthmore. The classes have to be small because:</p>
<p>a) there is an unusually high degree of one on one interaction between students and professors. </p>
<p>b) there is an unusually high degree of student-driven presentation and discussion in the classroom.</p>
<p>Let me give a couple of examples. In my D's freshman Physics seminar, she prepared problem sets on Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and presented them to the entire class EVERY week, as did every other student in the class. This involved several hours on Sunday night in a study group in which all 12 students helped each other figure out the problems sets and weekly one-on-one meetings with the professor.</p>
<p>In other classes, writing a paper involved a meeting with the professor to discuss the topic and initial ideas. Then, a submission of a first draft, followed by another meeting with the professor to discuss revisions, before turning in a final draft.</p>
<p>In yet another seminar, each of the 12 students was assigned an internship with a Phila. area non-profit social service organization. Then, in each 3 hour weekly seminar, the discussion revolved around not only the reading, but how the theories in the reading applied to the reality of each internship. The final paper was a history of each non-profit including an interview with the founder of each organization. This is a very intensive kind of learning on the part of the professor. You simply can't do this sort of thing in classes of 30 or 40 or 50 students.</p>
<p>On the honors program:</p>
<p>It is a totally unique program. Honors students spend their junior and senior years doing in depth study and a senior thesis in three areas of specialty. This is mostly independent study and/or seminars with just a handful of students and a professor. At the end of senior year, 160 outside experts come to campus and each senior honors student sits for written exams and oral exams by a panel of three of these experts. These outside experts then determine whether the student graduates with honors, high honors, or higest honors.</p>
<p>Until 1996, honors students didn't receive grades at all. Since then, they have been awarded grades retroactively based on the level of honors awarded by the outside examiners.</p>
<p>There is no other way to graduate with honors at Swarthmore.</p>
<p>The honors program is not for everybody and plenty of very strong students opt not to take the honors track. There are some advantages to the honors track in some of the very large departments. In other departments, it doesn't really make much difference because all of the courses are small seminars and a senior thesis is required anyway.</p>
<p>Achat:</p>
<p>I've read that the biggest complaint from students about new or visiting professors at Swarthmore is that they aren't demanding enough. It takes them a while to get up to speed.</p>