Odds are, a day before the start of classes, you’ll find a horde of freshmen enveloping either Book Culture, the Columbia Bookstore, or the library, scrambling to find copies of The Iliad, Aeneid, and Symposium in time for their first class of Literature Humanities (LitHum). In just a few short weeks, you’ll find those same freshmen in Carman floor lounges, Ferris, or Uris bemoaning the hundreds of pages they were assigned to read of those very same books. But after the obligatory workload complaints, you’ll also hear intense discussion, debate, and disagreement on the fabric of these texts—the kind of authentic engagement that isn’t always rewarded by the grading structure.
This intellectual spirit, as we’re routinely reminded, is the principal goal of Columbia’s Core Curriculum. The euphemism of teaching students not what to think but how to think has indeed become cliché, yet this pedagogical philosophy undoubtedly remains at the heart of the Core. It is meant not just as another set of requirements to fulfill but rather viewed as Columbia’s signature academic program and primary selling point, emblematic of the school’s approach to education as a whole.
While this vision is admirable, for many students, it is simply not the reality. Assessment methods used in many Core classes prioritize memorization and regurgitation of facts over intellectual inquiry, creating a disconnect between the Core’s stated goals and the students’ quotidian experience.
The Core Curriculum bulletin details the origins of Columbia’s Core, which started with the creation of Contemporary Civilization (CC) in 1919. CC was originally conceived by the philosopher and education theorist John Dewey as a progressive educational experiment, with the bulletin noting that “rather than focusing on the transmission of knowledge and the development of expertise, Contemporary Civilization would provide students with a space to develop their own ideas and create knowledge collectively at the intersection of historical consciousness and self-awareness.” The goal of this course was not for students to master existing facts, but instead, for them to “develop their own perspectives” and “create knowledge collectively” through discussion and critical inquiry.
With this open-ended structure, the question then becomes a matter of how, exactly, students are expected to demonstrate their learning.
Despite the common syllabus and mission that unite Core sections, there is no shared assessment structure. Some professors mandate that papers and analytical essays make up the bulk of a grade. Others prioritize exams, usually consisting of some combination of passage identifications, short paragraph responses, and longer essays. A majority, in my experience, simply use a mix of both. Columbia presents this flexibility as a strength, describing the Core as a “common syllabus; uncommon experience.” Students are meant to engage with the same texts while also benefiting from different classroom environments tailored to their professor’s strengths as an educator.
Not all assessment differences, however, are equally consistent with the Core’s original mission. While professors may approach The Republic or The Odyssey from different angles, the skills they assess should still reflect the broader curriculum’s goals. The Core exists to cultivate critical thinking and independent analysis; it follows that students should be evaluated precisely on those abilities, not on any one instructor’s individual whim.
The latter, lamentably, happens all too often. When what is measured becomes how much information a student can remember and regurgitate on an exam, these classes fall short of the Core’s true mission.
The most egregious example of this might be the commonly-employed passage identification (passage IDs). In these questions, students are provided with a short excerpt from a work from the syllabus, and are then asked to identify its source, author, and broader context—sometimes even the specific year the source was published. Most exams contain anywhere from 10 to 15 or more passage IDs. Given that Core classes routinely assign hundreds of pages per week, passage IDs are meant to reward those who complete the readings. Just how effective this all is in the age of AI remains an open question.
And still, completing the reading does not demonstrate critical thinking per se. A student who remembers that a particular line came from The Aeneid rather than The Iliad may not be able to explain its broader significance, connect it to other themes, or evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Passage IDs assess recognition rather than understanding, and leave no opportunity for students to display their critical thinking.
While passage IDs are the most common form of testing students’ memorization, there are also other testing methods that create similar counterproductive results, thus undermining Dewey’s original vision for CC. Some professors provide students with a list of vocabulary words, and students have to identify which text they came from. There are also other professors who give pop-reading quizzes as a way to incentivize students to be prepared for class. While these represent a less egregious affront to CC’s original mission because they typically do not constitute a bulk of an exam or grade, their existence is still antithetical to the point of the Core.
To be clear, this is not an argument against knowing the facts of the texts, as familiarity with the works is a necessary prerequisite for meaningful discussion. After all, you can’t think critically about Locke without having read Locke first. But sheer memorization of the text itself should not be the primary object of evaluation.
I have seen my friends in Butler before exam season painstakingly trying to find differences in writing styles and word choices to study for the passage IDs. I am one of the seemingly few lucky students who have never had to do this, and I believe my own Core experience is a good example of what the curriculum intends to do.
In LitHum, my professor assigned three analytical papers throughout the semester with no exams. These papers were open-ended, allowing us to explore any topic in whichever reading interested us the most.
My CC professor had a similar approach. Although we had exams, they consisted entirely of short-response paragraphs and essays. One of the questions would mirror a passage ID, as it provided students with a section of text, but the focus was not on identifying where it came from. Instead, the section of text usually spanned a couple of pages; we were then asked to explain and evaluate the passage’s purpose in the broader text. Other prompts were open-ended questions, requiring students to build arguments and engage directly with the ideas they had spent the semester learning.
These assessments were not necessarily easier than memorization-based exams. If anything, they were more demanding, as they required engaging with the text in a deep and meaningful way. Writing paragraphs, essays, and papers requires students to synthesize readings, anticipate counterarguments, and develop original claims. These are precisely the kinds of skills the Core aims to cultivate. These assessments reward students for thinking.
Now, some variation between sections is both inevitable and may even be desirable. The Core would lose much of its value if every professor were forced into a more rigid, standardized curriculum à la high school Advanced Placement. The freedom to explore different themes, ask different questions, and design different assignments—or to have the instructor include a text not on the official syllabus, as is often the case—is what makes each student’s Core experience unique. This is a university, not Kumon.
However, pedagogical flexibility must not entail abandoning curricular coherence. If Columbia truly believes the purpose of the Core is to help students develop their critical thinking skills, then the assessments should reflect that. Rather than standardize how professors evaluate their students, the University should standardize the skills that these assessments are meant to gauge. This would be standardization in service of a worthy goal: testing the true understanding of students, not whether they can memorize facts.
Every Core section should give students meaningful opportunities to analyze primary texts, develop and defend their own arguments, and pursue questions of their own interest. The University could provide a variety of assessment methods that test for these skills, whether it be a traditional essay, research paper, open-ended exam, presentation, or other method that promotes critical thinking. It would still remain the professor’s discretion as to what combination of assessments they give their class. If a professor feels strongly about an assessment method not listed, they could petition to have it added, provided it tests for the skillset the Core preaches.
The Core’s greatest strength has never been about the texts themselves. Hundreds of universities offer similar classes. What makes Columbia’s Core distinct, or what should make it distinct, is its promise that students will wrestle with these texts together, challenging one another’s perspectives and developing their critical thinking skills in the process. If Columbia’s Core is meant to teach students what to think, then their exams should actually give students something worth thinking about.
Ms. Rajan is a junior at Columbia College majoring in economics and political science. She is a senior editor for Sundial.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.