BLIND MAN'S BUFF

As the first of May--the day on which the undergraduate must hand in his study card--is again almost at hand, the problem of adjusting the enrollment of some of our popular courses to the facilities for instruction in them again presents itself. Every year we have the situation of three or four courses whose registration far exceeds the anticipated number. For one reason or another a large number of students develop a sudden desire to hear this or that professor, or to study this or that subject or period. The result is that three or four times the normal number of men receive approximately one-third or one-fourth the attention which it is the pride of many professors to devote to their students. It is not strange, therefore, if not a few of those who take the course feel that they have to a certain extent been cheated out of the best which the course has to offer, particularly in the direction of personal contact with their instructors.

To remedy this situation, it is suggested that the Office might be able to forestall any such overcrowding if the lists of men taking each course were made up more promptly. Then if it were discovered that a given course was too full for the best interests of student and professor, the Office would be able arbitrarily to cut down the enrollment, giving preference to men in the department and those in the last two years of their residence. If the revised list were "out" before the close of the college year, those who were unsuccessful in their applications would be able to select another course at their leisure and much of the strain and loss of time would be avoided in the first two weeks of the college year. Then too, those who were anxious to gain everything possible from the course in question would many of them prefer to postpone taking it for a year rather when enter it knowing that it was over full. "Force-warned is forearmed," and no one need be forced to remain in a course discovered at the last minute to be overflowing because it was too difficult to find an acceptable substitute at such short notice. Some such scheme for equalizing registration from year to year and eliminating the present game of blind man's buff is the logical answer to the situation as it now exists.