Reverse Engineering the Syllabus

Note: I’m reviving this blog as a catch-all for thoughts about graduate school and higher education/academia more generally.   Updates will, I’m sure, be sporadic.   — HB

A new semester is ramping up for me and as it does, I’ve been thinking about syllabi. Most students look at a course syllabus first and foremost as a to-do list, a roster of things that must be done and when they’re due. This is a perfectly reasonable and practical thing to do.

As it turns out, however, syllabi are like most texts in that they repay closer reading and more attention. In my experience, knowing how to read a syllabus closely and thoughtfully will help you understand the material better, do better on assignments, and become a far better participant in classroom discussions. A syllabus can tell you a great deal about your professor’s pedagogical leanings, about what they are trying to do with the course, and the ways you’re most likely to be successful in approaching the material.

The first thing I like to do with a new syllabus — after giving it a once-over and putting the relevant due dates into my calendar — is to look for clues as to how the professor is thinking about the class, both in terms of the subject and in terms of what the class meetings and discussions might be like.

For instance, how many texts are assigned?  A syllabus with very few texts is likely to point toward a class in which each text will be dealt with in minute detail, while more texts means less class time per text.  This is useful in helping you figure out how to prepare and how much material you should actually have in your hip pocket when you get to class, ready to bring it to the table.  Bearing in mind that professors may choose to concentrate on one text only out of several that were assigned, there can be a big difference between a three-hour seminar with one text assigned per seminar and a seminar of similar length with four or five texts per class meeting. (You’ll get a feel as you go of whether your professor is the sort to concentrate on one text out of several or not, and can adjust accordingly)

Are the texts clustered in thematic groups?  The syllabus may not indicate that they are, but they could be anyway.  Figuring this out may require a quick library database search, and a light skim of a review or two of each of the assigned books.

The same skimming of reviews can also tell you whether the professor seems to be concentrating on a single approach to the topic or multiple ones.  If there are multiple approaches in play, see if the order in which they come on the syllabus suggests that a particular underlying question or argument is implied.  It is fairly common, for instance, for professors to assign books that “talk back” to other books assigned earlier in the semester, to give students a sense of what the larger academic conversation on a subject is like.  Or they might assign a range of books that apply numerous different methodologies to a single general topic.  If so, you can be sure that those things will be important to your in-class discussions, and you’ll want to be prepared to talk about them.

Next I like to look at the written assignments, presentations, and other things that I as a student will be asked to produce for the class.  How are they spaced across the semester?  Do you have a professor who has given you enough chances to produce that you’ll get written feedback and grades across the semester, thus letting you know how you’re doing along the way?  Or do you have a professor who doesn’t expect a single page from you until the final paper is due, putting all your eggs into that one basket for you whether you like it or not?  These things will help you strategize in terms of your schedule and how you spread out your work time across the semester, as well as about things like going to office hours to ask for some verbal feedback if you aren’t likely to be getting it from assignments.

Similarly, I pay attention to whether the assignments are all of the same type or whether they vary in nature.  In graduate school, a course whose written assignments consist of five book reviews is not necessarily a poorly taught course with boring repetitive assignments.  Your instructor may well be thinking about it as a course that is partly about teaching you to write academic book reviews.  Even if they aren’t explicitly thinking this, you can be.  Writing five book reviews will be more palatable if you have the perspective on the syllabus to look at the course as having a dual pedagogy — getting you to engage the topic, but also contributing to your professionalization by giving you practice at a common professorial form of writing that is useful for adding some meat to your CV.

By contrast, a course with multiple written assignments that are all of different types can teach you to engage a subject from multiple scholarly perspectives and in more than one academic performance style.  If there are written assignments you’re not familiar with completing, reviewing the syllabus is a good time to mark them so you can leave yourself a little extra time to ask questions, seek out research help or hit the writing center, and otherwise help yourself learn how to do that particular type of assignment.

Finally, I reread the boilerplate and make sure I know how grades are calculated.  If the syllabus does not make it crystal clear, at least I know to ask questions.  Cynically but realistically, you at least need to know what the cost of doing business is when the inevitable happens and there is a class for which you have the choice of getting some sleep or trying to do some minimal class prep.

Basically, this is a process of reverse-engineering the syllabus.  Your professor will have taken the time to put the syllabus together, and at least in theory will have reasons for making the decisions they made in terms of choosing texts, writing up assignments, distributing the workload, and so on.  Part of the learner’s job, as I see it, is to figure out what the professor’s reasons are, and in so doing, to understand from the outset a little more about exactly what it is that you should be able to take away from the class.

As a bonus, you can learn a fair bit about putting together a syllabus by dissecting those written by your own professors… and never forget, even a bad example is a good example of a mistake you don’t want to make.  It’s always nice to learn those things at someone else’s expense rather than your own.