Swarthmore Academic Support

interesteddad
Sun, 01 May 2011 12:47:23 +0000

Swarthmore is a recognized leader in academic support.

The Writing Associates program was one of the first in the country to develop and implement the “writing across the curriculum” model. It was actually developed by a Swarthmore grad at Brown who worked simulatenously with her old English prof at Swarthmore who started a similar program at Swarthmore. Today, the resources Swarthmore throws at its Writing Associates program is beyond what any other liberal arts college invests. A tenured professor has full-time responsibility for the writing program – unheard of. It’s usually a part-time side assignment (at best) or a post-doc postion. The student mentors complete a full-semester, full-credit seminar in writing pedagogy. It’s basically a graduate level seminar in writing instruction. Again, unheard of. The number of courses that have assigned writing mentors and mandatory review/revision is very unusual. This includes all the section of the intro bio course, where WA’s help teach writing lab reports. Swarthmore has been recognized as a leader and it often cited by faculty studies at other top schools as a model.

Swarthmore has a multi-million dollar HHMI grant to develop a similar peer mentoring progam in the sciences. That’s been underway for several years now, basically a program of training students to serve as peer mentors in formal study group format.

I believe that one of the defining characteristics of the Swarthmore undergrad program is that it is both highly demanding and highly collaborative. My daughter experienced this right away with a first semester physics seminar that revolved around student presentation of problem sets each week. Her weekly schedule included the three hour seminar, a Sunday night study group where students gathered to work on the problem sets together. And, then meetings with the professor before presenting her problem set.

She used the WA writing review program frequently throughout her four years at Swarthmore and I think gained a lot from bouncing her papers off another student for comment and suggestions.