ANOTHER LINK

Following up the preliminary announcement as stated by President Lowell in his Report for 1926, the Department of Biology now offers the details of its new program, necessitated by its adoption of the tutorial system. Thus one more field of concentration falls in with the movement towards greater reliance on tutorial methods--a movement which has been the outstanding characteristic of Harvard education since 1911.

The optional choice which the Department offers to those men in this year's graduating class is an opportunity for a practical test of the system. The results of the general oral examination as compared with those of the written examinations in the subjects of concentration, that is--with the former plan, should indicate which type of inquiry produces the more satisfactory evidence that a man coming up for his degree is equipped in his field. The exact influence of the tutors perforce must remain to be proved as far as this department is concerned.

The fact that those who take the generals will not have had the benefits of tutorial instruction will probably bear considerable weight. Whatever be the outcome, one thing is certain: in accepting the tutorial system, in advancing plans for its immediate adoption, the Department of Biology is defying the argument which the system's antagonists propounded when it was first brought to America--that it would prove infeasible in the undergraduate sciences. It is not entirely insignificant that it was the Faculty of Medicine which first adopted the tutorial method at Harvard.