After spending more than a year reviewing its undergraduate curriculum, Harvard University released a report this week that proposes significant changes in how its students are educated, including discarding the university's well-known core program while emphasizing the importance of science and language courses for all undergraduates.

The university's core curriculum is the set of requirements that all Harvard students, regardless of their major, must complete. Under the proposed changes, students would still have to complete a set of general-education requirements but would have more freedom in choosing their courses.

The report is also remarkable for its candid discussion of the shortcomings of one of the nation's elite institutions, including insufficient contact between students and faculty members at Harvard and a failure of the current curriculum to pay enough attention to basic skills like written and oral communication.

Many of the proposed changes, according to Jeffrey Wolcowitz, associate dean of Harvard College, the university's undergraduate division, were prompted by a desire to make sure students are exposed to a wider range of knowledge. "We're moving it along the spectrum away from specialization and toward educating students more broadly," he said.

The last time Harvard reviewed its undergraduate curriculum, in 1978, the results influenced colleges across the country, according to Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. This time, however, while some of the recommendations may be influential, she said, others simply mirror what a number of colleges already have in place, such as encouraging "skills across the curriculum" and "capstone learning," which refers to a set of senior-level courses intended to make a student's college experience more cohesive and meaningful.

Among the proposals is an incentive for all students to study abroad. The report stops short of requiring undergraduates to spend a semester in another country, but it does propose that a student's transcript indicate whether he or she has participated in a study-abroad program.

"This is a very major change for us," said William C. Kirby, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. Mr. Kirby said the proportion of Harvard students who took classes abroad was very low when compared with that of similar institutions.

The report also recommends that the university "rethink basic science education." Among its suggestions are making classes more interdisciplinary and ensuring that humanities students are capable of doing "serious work in the sciences," according to Mr. Kirby.

The next step is for the proposals to be debated by Harvard faculty members, a process that begins this week. It will be a year or more, college officials say, before decisions are made about which of the recommendations to adopt.