ABOLISH ALL EXAMINATIONS EXCEPTING DIVISIONALS SAYS TUTORIAL ENTHUSIAST

The secondary schools . . . are not sending to Harvard large quantities of men qualified to assume at the start the captaincy of their own intellects.

Let the student be as free as it is humanly possible.

If properly applied, the tutorial system is a practical solution, a step toward the ideal.

The examinations must go.

There must be more tutors and there must be better tutors.

A Professor remarks with resigned but well-put cynicism that "sometimes one tires of pouring knowledge into buckets without bottoms." He receives the response that he expects, laughter, denoting a class, conscious but not convicted of sin. The dances!

A College publication takes to its bosom the woes of the undergraduate "whose desire for knowledge is distorted by restrictions, and sicklied o'er by contact with the chill, thus must thou do! Ambition burns, but it is shut within a hamper, with the Faculty and the System sitting upon the lid. The tyrants!

The significance of it all is that there exists a dissatisfaction, partially chronic but entirely justified, as to the present status of Education at Harvard. The teaching staff, remembering its own sacrifices for an education, is likely to regard the absence of the will to learn on the part of the undergraduate as the fundamental factor vitiating an otherwise fairly efficient and adaptable educational system. On the other hand the average undergraduate brought face to face with a great machinery that tends to impose a certain orthodoxy upon his fields of mental activity, so classify and label him, to assign a pigeon-hole as the area of his progress, naturally cries "Away with the monster. Paternalism and nothing else is the cause of my stagnation."

Both views are at once right and wrong. Ideally, of course, Harvard should be a place where men eager and even determined to acquire knowledge and wisdom are brought into personal contact with teachers eager to instruct and determined to avail themselves of every art to stimulate and aid the intellectual advancement of individual students.

Should Not Have Much Compulsion

There are, however, some very definite practical limitations to the attainment of this ideal. The secondary schools with their emphasis on compulsion are not sending to Harvard large quantities of men qualified to assume at the start the captaincy of their won intellection Time is required before there can be implanted in them a tradition of intellectual initiative.

A degree of compulsion is essential for another reason. The success which a college education is supposed to bring in the outside world is too nebulous and too remote a prospect to be a successful incitement to diligence in the pursuit of culture. All men are more or less lazy and some entirely so. In many cases it is to be feared that if all intra-College examinations were abolished, undergraduates free to work as they pleased, would work as little as they pleased. It is not fashionable among undergraduates to admit this fact, but it needs no psychological expert to proclaim its obviousness. Some compulsion there must be, but compulsion in Education is an evil, Harvard should have no more of it than is necessary. Let the student be as free as it is humanly possible.

Tutorial System a Remedy

There is a second objection to the ideal--the size of the College. It has been said that one may know all the girls in Boston but as for knowing all the members of one's own class, c'est a rire, the obstacles of numbers is too great. From this numerical incubus arises a difficulty. The personal element tends to disappear from instruction. In any college the quantity of really eminent professors is limited; the more students in a college the less opportunity any student has to receive from these eminent men a stimulation and assistance adapted to his individual needs. Enter the machinery as a substitute and the tutorial plan as a remedy for the thick-fingered bunglings of mechanical

Perhaps, the most pressing necessity before Harvard today is the awakening of intellectual initiative through the minimizing of compulsion and the maximizing of stimulation, by a Faculty, familiar with the needs of individuals rather than the requirements of groups. If properly applied, the tutorial system is a practical solution, a step toward the ideal.

Must Exile Examinations

At present it is not properly applied. On the one hand there is a system emphasizing a calm, dignified tour of the realms of gold, steady but unhurried, reaching its culmination in the General examinations. On the other hand is the archaic examination system reducing travelling to a series of periodic packings and last minute spurts. The two structures are mutually repellent, the future suffers for the sake of the immediate, tutorial work becomes a prey to the "throw a few facts in your suitcase" method, and college becomes analagous to the business cycle, a period of rapid expansion succeeded by a period of more rapid depression. In order to stabilize scholarship the examination must as far as possible be exiled from Harvard education.

The question of what degree of free dom shall be permitted to students is a very delicate one. The transition from school to college is at present so violent and in cases so disastrous, that it is doubtful wisdom to widen the breach Freshmen should be subject to the examination system as they now are, in order that their fitness to do college work may be tested and in order that a new found freedom may not develop into licensed idleness. Sophomores, also, should be subject to the examination with the exception of those who as Freshmen reached Groups I and II of the Rank List. These intellectual aristocrats, having proved their worth, should, if they have decided upon a field of concentration, be freed from the examination and assigned to a tutor. By this plan Freshmen, although necessarily subject to compulsion, will have an incentive before them, the possibility of ridding themselves from the examination by one year of application.

At the beginning of the Junior year all students in fields of concentration to which the tutorial plan can be applied should be freed from the necessity of taking any examinations in their chosen fields. Undesirable as such an action would be in the case of Freshmen, it is almost an essential in the case of the Junior. In the world at large success is usually the result of self-willed activity. In refusing to throw upon the Junior the responsibility for his own progress, the College is repeating the error of the secondary school: it is doing nothing to bridge the gap between it and the higher unit. Examinations are no doubt valuable as an exercise in clear thinking under high pressure, but in their other manifestations they are undesirable, and, at any rate, the Junior and Senior receives enough of such training in his nonconcentration courses. The examination must go.

The general examinations might well remain, however, as a minimum standard to which the candidate for a degree must conform and as an inspiration to the constitutionally idle. This is compulsion at a sane and healthy minimum. As an added incentive to original work every candidate for a degree should be required to submit a thesis upon some subject in his field of concentration, for, after all, an examination even of the most improved form places an emphasis on the marshalling rather than the creative faculties of man. The writing of a thesis ought not to prove particularly onerous in consideration of the abolition of the examination, and it should prove a source of gratification to the under graduate ego an opportunity to do something of one's own rather than a compulsion to complete an assignment by some-one else. Special honors should be granted for the best theses in each department. In addition, the announcement of the prizes for essays, poems, and special studies, now existing in the College should be made a little more articulate, and the winners of such interests should, at least, be sure of public mention.

The personal element on the problem resolves itself into two main considerations. There must be more tutors and there must be better tutors. In order that the system may work to its best advantage no tutor should have more than five or six students assigned to him. He should be able to become not only acquainted but intimate with them all. He should meet them not once in two weeks but two or three times a week, and at least once a week he should meet all his students together for informal and sociable discussion. It is obvious that with larger groups intimacy must be sacrificed to numbers; for the greatest good to all concerned the groups must be kept small. It is equally obvious that for the good of the students the quality of the tutors must be kept high. Tutors should know but they should also be men. They should, as Emerson Would say, be men thinking rather than thinkers, men knowing rather than knowers.

The progress of Education at Harvard demands the extension of the tutorial system and the weeding out of the examination. Perhaps on a later day the resigned and cynical professor may discover that his buckets have developed bottoms, and the College publications may see the average undergraduate, uncabinned, uncribbed, unconfined. Perhaps, someday. Perhaps-Well, why not

Perhaps, the most pressing necessity before Harvard today is the awakening of intellectual initiative through the minimizing of compulsion and the maximizing of stimulation, by a Faculty, familiar with the needs of individuals rather than the requirements of groups. If properly applied, the tutorial system is a practical solution, a step toward the ideal.

Must Exile Examinations

At present it is not properly applied. On the one hand there is a system emphasizing a calm, dignified tour of the realms of gold, steady but unhurried, reaching its culmination in the General examinations. On the other hand is the archaic examination system reducing travelling to a series of periodic packings and last minute spurts. The two structures are mutually repellent, the future suffers for the sake of the immediate, tutorial work becomes a prey to the "throw a few facts in your suitcase" method, and college becomes analagous to the business cycle, a period of rapid expansion succeeded by a period of more rapid depression. In order to stabilize scholarship the examination must as far as possible be exiled from Harvard education.

The question of what degree of free dom shall be permitted to students is a very delicate one. The transition from school to college is at present so violent and in cases so disastrous, that it is doubtful wisdom to widen the breach Freshmen should be subject to the examination system as they now are, in order that their fitness to do college work may be tested and in order that a new found freedom may not develop into licensed idleness. Sophomores, also, should be subject to the examination with the exception of those who as Freshmen reached Groups I and II of the Rank List. These intellectual aristocrats, having proved their worth, should, if they have decided upon a field of concentration, be freed from the examination and assigned to a tutor. By this plan Freshmen, although necessarily subject to compulsion, will have an incentive before them, the possibility of ridding themselves from the examination by one year of application.

At the beginning of the Junior year all students in fields of concentration to which the tutorial plan can be applied should be freed from the necessity of taking any examinations in their chosen fields. Undesirable as such an action would be in the case of Freshmen, it is almost an essential in the case of the Junior. In the world at large success is usually the result of self-willed activity. In refusing to throw upon the Junior the responsibility for his own progress, the College is repeating the error of the secondary school: it is doing nothing to bridge the gap between it and the higher unit. Examinations are no doubt valuable as an exercise in clear thinking under high pressure, but in their other manifestations they are undesirable, and, at any rate, the Junior and Senior receives enough of such training in his nonconcentration courses. The examination must go.

The general examinations might well remain, however, as a minimum standard to which the candidate for a degree must conform and as an inspiration to the constitutionally idle. This is compulsion at a sane and healthy minimum. As an added incentive to original work every candidate for a degree should be required to submit a thesis upon some subject in his field of concentration, for, after all, an examination even of the most improved form places an emphasis on the marshalling rather than the creative faculties of man. The writing of a thesis ought not to prove particularly onerous in consideration of the abolition of the examination, and it should prove a source of gratification to the under graduate ego an opportunity to do something of one's own rather than a compulsion to complete an assignment by some-one else. Special honors should be granted for the best theses in each department. In addition, the announcement of the prizes for essays, poems, and special studies, now existing in the College should be made a little more articulate, and the winners of such interests should, at least, be sure of public mention.

The personal element on the problem resolves itself into two main considerations. There must be more tutors and there must be better tutors. In order that the system may work to its best advantage no tutor should have more than five or six students assigned to him. He should be able to become not only acquainted but intimate with them all. He should meet them not once in two weeks but two or three times a week, and at least once a week he should meet all his students together for informal and sociable discussion. It is obvious that with larger groups intimacy must be sacrificed to numbers; for the greatest good to all concerned the groups must be kept small. It is equally obvious that for the good of the students the quality of the tutors must be kept high. Tutors should know but they should also be men. They should, as Emerson Would say, be men thinking rather than thinkers, men knowing rather than knowers.

The progress of Education at Harvard demands the extension of the tutorial system and the weeding out of the examination. Perhaps on a later day the resigned and cynical professor may discover that his buckets have developed bottoms, and the College publications may see the average undergraduate, uncabinned, uncribbed, unconfined. Perhaps, someday. Perhaps-Well, why not