In the late-night study rooms and buzzing first-year seminars across the Claremont Colleges, first-years wrestle with a familiar challenge this fall: learning to write the “college way.”
First-year writing programs across the Claremont Colleges aim to ease the transition into college-level writing by helping students unlearn old habits and develop voices that fit the rhythm of higher education.
For many, this shift feels both daunting and exhilarating. High school essays had rewarded structure and formulaic work, whereas students are told that college work requires more critical thought. Gone are the days of five-paragraph arguments and tidy conclusions. In their place come questions of tone, credibility, as well as how to make an argument breathe and come alive on the page.
For many students, Pomona’s Critical Inquiry Seminar (ID1) program feels less like a single class and more like a constellation of possibilities. Each fall, first-year students scroll through a list of more than fifteen seminar titles, a catalogue that almost reads like a campus storybook — “Geology of Cold Places,” “Angels and Demons in Literature,” “Disneyland and American Dreams.”
For a moment, the anxiety of college work is replaced by genuine excitement. It’s not every day that a required writing course promises to take you from the Arctic to the afterlife to Anaheim.
After years of writing countless essays in high school, students are often surprised at the independence and self-chartered discovery that comes with college writing. Martin Wu PO ’29 believes, for example, that his ID1 — “Leaning About Bad Music” — has enlightened him in ways he didn’t expect.
“I was exposed to diverse music genres and unique instruments,” Wu said. “The readings and discussions about music’s role in society and religion were especially insightful and eye-opening.”
Just across Sixth Street at Claremont McKenna College, first-year students choose between a humanities seminar and a writing seminar for each semester of their first year. Each student ranks six course options, and if they aren’t satisfied with their placement, they can petition to switch into another class.
Arianna Hu CM ’29 opted for “Blue Humanities: The Black Aquatic,” a course that explores the human relationship with water through history, geography, feminism and cultural theory.
“It’s very diverse,” Hu said. “We talk about everything from water epistemology to environmental justice. I’m really intrigued with the philosophical content of my class specifically.”
This year, Scripps College introduced a newly redesigned Core Curriculum for first-years, structured as a two-part sequence: Core A in the fall and Core B in the spring. Incoming students rank their top seven choices for Core A, though placement is ultimately randomized.
All Core courses revolve around the theme “Histories of the Present.” However, each is taught by a different professor who contextualizes that broader theme within their own field of expertise.
Caitlin Kim SC ’29, who was placed in “Christian Her-Story” — a feminist perspective on the Bible — said the class has been inspiring.
“It gives us a great opportunity to learn about different cultures from a religious standpoint,” Kim said, “but it also encourages us to form our own interpretations after reading the texts in their most authentic form.”
At Pitzer, similarly to Scripps, Pomona and CMC, first-years rank their top choices out of a catalogue of courses that vary in content but share an emphasis on developing writing skills. At Harvey Mudd, due to the emphasis on STEM, the core requirements of first-years differ drastically from other schools — students take all of their first-semester courses pass/fail, and have a set schedule of math, computer science and science classes that includes one writing class.
Although many first-years across the 5Cs have reported enjoying and benefitting from their first-year writing courses, students also note that their experiences differ drastically depending on the course.
For Pomona, Scripps and Claremont McKenna, each student’s experience depends heavily on the introductory course they land in. While that range offers freedom, it also introduces variation in expectations and grading — an issue that has become increasingly visible as students compare workloads and feedback across different sections.
Nina Haque PO ’29, whose ID1 course is “Education as Freedom,” described the general workload for each specific course as “all over the place”— from film analysis to twelve-page papers to creative mapping assignments — explaining that the content and homework vary widely depending on which ID1 course a student is placed in.
“My ID1 is quite challenging, and I think I’d enjoy it more if grades weren’t such a big deal,” Haque said. “It’s supposed to introduce us to the liberal arts, but the pressure kind of overshadows that.”
Haque added that while the class is meant to teach writing, “some of the given assignments assume we already know how [to write.]”
The wide range of course content has sparked conversations among students about what these writing classes are really meant to measure. Some argue that a pass/fail system, such as the one Harvey Mudd uses in the fall, would level the playing field and allow students to focus on growth rather than grades. Within Pomona’s Academic Affairs Committee, members of the politics and curriculum subgroups have already begun to consider what such a change might look like.
The goal of ASPC’s committee discussion is oriented less toward easing rigor and more toward giving students space to take risks without the weight of constant grading. Jolin Yu PO ’29, a member of the Academic Affairs Politics Committee, explained that the group has discussed the possibility of extending “shadow grading” to ID1 courses.
“Students have reflected that there’s a wide variation of rigor between classes,” Yu said. “[Some] STEM courses like chemistry and biology already use shadow grading for first-years, so humanities might eventually take that route as well.”
Halfway through the semester, the conversation around grading continues, but so does the steady learning taking place within these courses. For most first-years at the Claremont Colleges, the introductory classes serve as a crash course in not only college writing but also in discovering their own voices and new approaches to writing.
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