Questions instead of majors: implementing a self-authored concentration program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The major is a standard undergraduate degree structure in which learners follow largely predetermined course paths with the primary goal of developing content knowledge and skills. Developing the more sophisticated ability to author inquiry is typically deferred to graduate training but can, we believe, be successfully cultivated in undergraduates through a self-authored concentration. This approach flips the conventional order of higher education by establishing self-authorship as the primary goal, from which knowledge and skill acquisition follow, and by placing primary responsibility on students – guided by faculty mentors – to design their course of study. As an extreme form of interdisciplinary inquiry-based learning and of self-designed majors, the self-authored concentration poses a deliberately disorienting dilemma in service of a deliberately developmental degree, preparing graduates for the rapidly changing demands of the future. We describe the implementation, features of success, and trade-offs of one such program, the single degree offering at Quest University Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".