As the SAGES program begins to wind down, it is vital to understand the legacy and impact of the program on Case Western Reserve University students. For a program that played such a key role in the anxieties of CWRU students, it held no actual impact on the writing skills of CWRU students due to its failed course timeline, especially its USNA courses. Even if the courses were interesting and the professors were some of my favorites at this school, the SAGES program harbors a legacy of sheer ineffectiveness.
For those unfamiliar with SAGES, before the class of 2023, undergraduate students were required to take three seminar courses as part of the university’s general education requirements. These courses, which did not count for 98% of majors, were aligned with three thematic areas that corresponded to the last letters of the course code: “SO” for the social world, “SY” for the symbolic world and “NA” for the natural world. The latter became a problem for most students due to a scarcity of USNAs, which were designed for students to take after their first semester at CWRU.
Like many students, I couldn’t take my USNA course until the second semester of my junior year. I guess that midway through that year, at least half, if not more, of my class was missing a USNA requirement. To top this, the SAGES department initially offered only 198 seats in USNAs for over six thousand undergraduate students. This lack of supply flabbergasted me and ruined the experience for many of my friends. Oddly enough, it was a problem that even SAGES administrators admitted to. The result was tons of stress and anxiety for students, so much so that it prompted us to want to disconnect entirely from the writing program at CWRU. How can we trust it if it fails to offer an adequate number of classes for a growing student body?
As a result, the scarcity of the USNA courses made them beyond valuable; so many students needed to get the seminars but often could only get them very late in their academic careers. This instance is against the recommendation of the SAGES department’s website, which stresses completing these courses within the first two years. Herein lies the crux of the problem. Due to the self-inflicted scarcity of the SAGES program, the classes were ineffective and taught skills that we experienced through our major degree programs. SAGES classes had limited educational value and became a time suck in the face of other courses and extracurricular activities.
Due to the lack of supply of USNAs, I was already deep into higher-level elective writing classes by the time I was taking mine.The late timing meant that my playground for learning and experimenting with writing skills and techniques was not in a SAGES classroom but in courses that counted toward my major. There was no other choice: with the absence of the SAGES program within the reasonably allocated time frame, I had to learn vital writing skills in classes that expected me to have already mastered them. With CWRU’s “sink or swim” competitive culture, students take high-level courses early in their academic careers. Therefore, students must already know the skills that were supposed to be taught by SAGES during those higher-level courses, even if they have yet to complete the course sequence.
The meager contribution of the SAGES program classes is shown not only through harrowing stories of students struggling to find a USNA but also through data. Every year, the SAGES department publishes a report based on the writing portfolios submitted during the previous academic year. This data revealed the program’s generally ineffective nature. For example, of the research essays submitted between 2023 and 2024, only 35% were classified as “Proficient,” the highest of four categories. Likewise, only 52% of essays had “a clearly-stated argumentative thesis statement” and 54% were “organized clearly and persuasively”.
What the data shows is that while SAGES had the potential to improve student writing, it instead faltered into the realm of incompetence, where only a slim majority of students, or sometimes a minority of them, could produce meaningful and authentic writing that meets basic benchmarks and standards. This ineffectiveness comes, at least partly, from the shortage of classes required to fulfill the program. Many students had no choice but to take SAGES classes later in their academic career, and they gained less and less from these courses as they’d already learned discipline-specific information from their upper-level courses. This reflects how SAGES classes fail to contribute to a student’s academic success and are generally just time wasters that cause undue anxiety and stress. The program ultimately detached students from one of the joys of college—trying out new courses and subject areas—by making the process frustrating at best and a waste of time at worst.