Course 6-7 curriculum restyled as explosive rise of machine learning takes hold in academia
The changes reflect the growing importance of machine learning in biology and computer science.
Early this month, the Registrar’s Office published an updated MIT Bulletin for the 2024–2025 academic year and introduced significant modifications to course curricula for numerous departments, including Course 6-7 (Computer Science and Molecular Biology).
6-7, the Institute’s 13th most popular major and one of four interdisciplinary majors jointly administered by Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS), has around 20 students enrolled in each class year. (In the 2023–2024 academic year, 73 students were declared 6-7 as a primary or secondary major as of the beginning of that fall semester.) The changes outlined in the course bulletin involve new departmental program updates for introductory and foundational classes, as well as restricted electives.
The 6-7 curriculum, since its establishment ahead of the ’11–’12 academic year, had not been—aside from minor updates such as in response to individual class alterations (the 12-unit class 7.09, for example, was split into the 6-unit classes 7.03 and 7.094 ahead of the ’20–’21 academic year) and new course offerings—significantly altered up until this point. The revision process for this bulletin’s change reportedly began around a year and a half ago and consulted several MIT-based researchers in the Biology and EECS departments, along with a more rigorous appraisal by an internal review committee, according to Education Officer for EECS and Professor of EECS Dennis Freeman.
For the introductory classes, the new curriculum requires Linear Algebra and Optimization (6C.06[J]). (Linear algebra as 18.06 was most recently included in the major curriculum in ’16–’17, as a potential satisfier for the mathematics requirement alongside 18.03.) Other modifications include no longer requiring Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science (6.100B). Furthermore, the updated degree chart replaced Mathematics for Computer Science (6.1200) with Discrete Mathematics and Proof for Computer Science (6.120A). 6.120A is a 6-unit class, whereas 6.1200 is a 12-unit class. The changes also include removing Thermodynamics II and Kinetics (5.602), a 6-unit class, for the chemistry requirement.
The major change to the Course 6-7 curriculum is the replacement of Design and Analysis of Algorithms (6.1220) with Introduction to Machine Learning (6.3900) for the “foundational subjects” component of the degree. Prior to the publication of the updated Course 6-7 curriculum, some Course 6-7 students successfully petitioned 6.3900 in place of 6.1220 in the 2023-2024 academic year. An alternate option to 6.3900 is Modeling with Machine Learning (6C.06) and Machine Learning in Molecular and Cellular Biology (7C.06), as 6C.06 and 7C.06 are 6-unit classes that are designed to be taken concurrently in the spring semester, according to the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing website.
Besides changes to the introductory and foundational courses, the new curriculum also revamped the restricted electives component. Previously, the restricted electives component required one class from the biology restricted electives listing and one class from the computational biology restricted electives listing; the new restricted electives track requires one computational biology class and two additional classes from any of the following lists: biology restricted electives, computational biology, or Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making (AI+D) advanced undergraduate subjects.
“The current revision was motivated primarily by faculty who work in this area and have directly witnessed the explosive importance of machine learning,” Freeman said in an emailed statement to The Tech. The committee replaced 6.1220 with 6.3900 and added 6C.06 as the department saw it as “essential for using machine learning effectively,” said Freeman.
The new major curriculum was not reflected on the primary EECS website by the time of publication; the EECSIS Online Portal has a checklist of completed requirements, which is available to each student in a Course 6-administered major, and that has been updated to reflect the 2024 bulletin.
Representatives for the Course 7 department did not comment by the time of publication.
“I think the new changes were a welcome addition to the 6-7 Major,” David Kwabi-Addo ’25 said. “It seems to push an emphasis on machine learning, which seems to be where the field of computational biology is slowly shifting towards in the future.”