PUTTING THE NEW ORALS INTO OPERATION.

The Faculty's additional rulings concerning the oral examinations work out the practical details of the new system. Most of them as the one limiting the length of the written test to one hour, are mere administrative regulations of no great significance. That a student should be allowed only one trial at the written examination seems a reasonable concession. For anyone who fails in this test after a minimum of two attempts at the oral quiz plus half a year of the tutorial course hardly deserves to be petted further.

And now the old oral examination itself is losing much of its arbitrariness. The student who is fairly proficient in both French and German, yet brilliant in neither, may try both languages. And with this granting of two chances vanish the conventional complaints of the unreasonableness of a single passage for translation or the exactions of a particular examiner. The new rules will not make an individual oral examination easier. They will make the system as a whole more fair, however, and will make the ultimate penalty--probation--a serious disgrace for delinquent upper-classmen.