The main goal of the Merit Workshop program is to develop a community of scholars among the participating students. The students help each other with difficult course problems, develop friendships based on common academic interests, and inspire each other to maintain a high level of commitment to excellence. In this model, students do both the learning and the teaching among themselves. During each workshop students work together in small groups on specially selected, challenging problems. While workshop problems are based on the same material covered in the lectures, they are designed to stretch each student's abilities to the fullest extent.
Students spend much of the workshop time collaborating in groups on the more difficult problems.
The facilitator gives few answers on the mechanics of problem solving, but rather encourages the students to think out loud, giving everyone in the group a chance to interact and react to each student's thoughts. This peer teaching has proved to be very effective for exposing student misconceptions and promoting more conceptual understanding. The group activities and the selected problems are designed to introduce both concepts and academic practices that can be of significant value later in either graduate school or in future career settings. Merit students attend the same lectures and labs as all of the students in the course. In addition they meet twice weekly for two-hour active learning workshop sessions.