Many more senior faculty are signing up for them. The Departments of English, Psychology, and Geology have been among the most active participants in the First-Year Seminar Program. But involvement in the program is expanding. For one thing, faculty members find the seminar format appealing. Teaching Biology 100 to 200 people is pretty impersonal.
Students also perform better in seminars.
In his own first-year seminar on Jewish identity, Schoem found that students worked much more intensively than in other courses, and he was able to set higher standards for the class. They really want to learn and find out answers and think through questions. It's their first taste of college. In that sense, it's very exciting. They have not been intellectually socialized as to how the discipline thinks about issues, so they bring a whole range of questions.