JUNIOR DIVISIONALS

The usual spring spectacle of Seniors meeting requirements and receiving degrees will be enlivened this year by the working out for the first time of an experiment far-reaching in its implications which, should it prove successful, may stir some witnesses to emulation. Honors candidates studying under the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature will complete, by handing in a thesis and submitting to a brief oral examination, the program adopted last year by the Committee which released them from written divisional tests in their field after Junior year.

The inception of this experiment had as its basis a desire to dismiss as early as possible the requirement of a survey of a large field, with a view toward selecting a small portion of that field for highly specialized work in Senior year. A written examination at the end of Junior year closes the consideration of perhaps five hundred years of history, and leaves the candidate free for leisurely work on a subject of his own choice, untroubled by the spectre of divisionals just before graduation.

While admitting the value of the plan in its opportunity for qualified students to tackle a job of original scholarship in their final college year, one cannot but wonder if the preliminaries are truly sound. There are dangers inherent in the program. The dismissal of the entire field after only two years of undergraduate study is too likely to be a real dismissal of a mass of fact considered unworthy of full understanding in the face of the more specialized work awaiting the student. Two years can hardly give an undergraduate a mastery of his field sufficient to quality him for intensive study in a portion of it. What it will give is a birdseye view whose details fade rapidly into a shadowy background.

The Senior, then, is thrown into the work of a thesis and concentrated study on a restricted field with a background so hastily assimilated that it is unwieldy for practical purposes. Specialization founded on this will lead in all probability to one of two things: intensive concentration on a small subject to the point of pedantry, or, more dangerous still, a mental confusion arising from insufficient absorption of background. Here the specialization becomes a hindrance rather than a help, a confinement rather than a liberation of the mind.

The ticket of admission to this field of scholarship in the Senior year is a passing grade in the written divisional examination the year before. It is just here that the proponents of the plan run a risk they have hoped to avoid, the magnifying beyond reason of the examination as such. The examination becomes something to be passed, a qualifying round to be met in the most feasible and expedient manner, for the privilege of attempting another, more specialized, task.

Examinations were made to be passed, but the character of the divisional may be changed by making it merely an opportunity for the student to organize and express what he has learned of a whole subject in three full years of study and reflection. In the freedom of extended time the less ambitious will find an advantage and the capable undergraduate will more nearly approach an understanding of his field sufficient for him to attempt a small specialized job in the form of a thesis in his final year. From a hurdle for the honors men the divisional becomes the natural consummation of a college career to which none should look forward with trepidation.