THE MERRY WIDOW

The development of the tutoring industry around the college has now reached the stage where students in a large lecture course are swamped with offers of assistance. If he feels the need of professional advice he is sometimes forced to choose between different seminars conducted by rival sophists; and if he tries to attend them all he will have trouble in finding time to look over his notes on the subject.

It is a strange thing, this impulse to trust to someone else's knowledge of a subject rather than to one's own. The room-mate, who took the course two years ago, is to be trusted rather than one's own notebook, the professional tutors, who have probably never taken the course at all are to be trusted most of all. The most objectionable thing about the tutoring schools is that they destroy confidence in a man's ability to prepare for an examination by himself; it is doubtful, as some authorities may think, that they enable even their most ardent devotees to go through Harvard without doing a sizable amount of work.