Foundations of Science is the single course on this campus that seems to make people shudder, regardless of their major or experience with it. It is also the only one used as an adjective among students. Receiving “FoS” as an answer to the question “How are you?” seems to be sufficient and garners sympathy immediately. Students have given up their intended majors entirely during or even prior to taking initial FoS courses. Some FoS students are seen less around campus and in some cases seem to have lost interest in engaging with the Student Interest Groups and community events. This matter does not seem to be improving. Why is this the case and what has NYU Abu Dhabi’s administration done to address the problem? The FoS curriculum is fundamentally flawed because of its workload, inflexibility, grade distribution, content, teaching methods and schedules.

The unnecessary — but present and acknowledged — intensity of FoS stems from its many components, including daily lectures and weekly labs, seminars and recitations. According to the syllabus, counting only the readings assigned daily for lectures FoS 1 and 2, students are covering 31 chapters in a mere 14 weeks. Of course, that is excluding the 14 reading assignments from the weekly labs. On top of readings, Physics assignments are given on biweekly basis, while Chemistry homework is given almost every week, with the assignments either being graded, or followed by a quiz on the due date. There are also in-class graded examples in both the Physics recitation and lectures, which require prior knowledge, readings, in-class experiments, lab reports, and programming assignments in the laboratory component. Thus, this overwhelming schedule and workload leaves students with next to no time to comprehend the concepts covered daily, which gives them little chance to perform well.

The workload, however, is not the only issue — the true flaw is in the workload’s division. Hala Aqel, Student Government Science Division Representative, claims, “One week, we would not have a lot of work, but another, we would be drowning in quizzes and assignments and reports and readings.”

The fact that any seven-week FoS course has at least two of the natural sciences in its curriculum, such as FoS 1 with Physics and Chemistry, only makes matters worse. Having to cover subjects in two major sciences at the same time is extremely distracting to students and causes a significant decline in their ability to focus on certain topics that build upon one another. A four-credit course should not have two extremely intense subjects covered in it.

Professors in FoS are also said to assume many topics taught to be already covered in high school, which causes exceptional stress for those who have never had experiences with them. According to Aqel, the content of FoS “is often taught to the student with the highest level of knowledge. People who are lost do not really know how to speak up and ask the professor to slow things down. Of course, when the professor asks if anyone understands, he will see the nodding faces of those who already have some idea of what the subject is about before the lecture, and the voices of those who do not understand will often go unheard.”

This is even mentioned by the professors during the first few lectures of FoS, in which they suggest that those who have previous knowledge should help those who do not and that eventually, everyone would be caught up.

Students have a variety of learning styles. While some are skilled at testing and completing examinations, others exhibit their best work in papers, for example. However this does not seem to be a concept recognized by FoS’s grade distribution. Within the syllabus, 15 percent of the final grade relies on graded assessments, five percent on attendance, ten percent on recitations and 70 percent on final and interval exams.

Thus, there seems to be no flexibility for those who depend on reports, papers, projects or research to demonstrate their mastery of material. This issue does seem to improve slightly in FoS 3 and 4, with only 65 percent of the grade in the Chemistry and Biology components depending on the exams, 60 percent in the Physics component and a seperate grade for the laboratory component.

Additionally, the FoS curriculum features many unnecessary topics, many of which do not apply to science or engineering majors and their concentration, but is, nonetheless, given to all of them. Many Physics majors are frustrated at the fact that they are forced to take Biology and Biology students feel the same way about Physics.

According to Aqel, “There is no necessity for students majoring in Biology to learn Quantum Mechanics.” She also adds that “Students have expressed their opinions that FoS 5 and 6 are too advanced for average science students.”

Splitting up the sciences into their own sections, instead of having them all under the umbrella of “Foundations of Science” seems to be a popular request from students to resolve these issues. The administration seems receptive to students’ feedback, offering meetings for small groups with the Dean and Associate Dean of Sciences to discuss their concerns. However, according to Aqel, the administration has also stressed the fact that FoS was made to be a representation of NYU Abu Dhabi’s philosophy as a liberal arts university and thus “we should look for integration, instead of division.”

There are benefits to studying sciences in interdisciplinary methods. However FoS in its current form is not offering an integrated form of the sciences. Aqel stressed the fact that FoS is “taught in a really modular way, with integration being equated with ‘same timing’, instead of true interdisciplinary learning.”

Many students fail to see the various sciences inform one another in the way that FoS is taught. FoS thus does not fulfill its primary purpose of integrating the sciences, which leaves it as an especially heavy course for students. Having a background in all sciences that would both relate to and help you understand your own field as a science major would be ideal, and students should ask for those benefits through a better integration of the sciences in FoS, instead of their complete division.

NYUAD administration has not overlooked the students’ concerns, but these concerns are steadily increasing, and are not being addressed quickly enough. The mental and physical stress and exhaustion caused by one class has become so unbearable to students that they are willing to give up entirely on their dream careers or majors just so they do not have to withstand it. In the end, many recognize that FoS could be effective, but the makeup of the course prevents that. . Changing that makeup can allow students to follow their dreams, absorb more information, restore their passion, have healthier mental and physical health, maintain a social life at this diverse institution and achieve countless other benefits.