THE EVIL OF SNAP COURSES

Of all the imperfections of the college system of instruction few are more pornicious than the existence of snap courses." The independence of courses is not such that the uselessness of some has no effect on the others. The academic system has a strong solidarity and the whole cannot be healthy where many parts are diseased.

The existence of snap courses is responsible in no small degree for the disrepute of scholarship. For one thing, an indiscriminate distribution of A's inevitably lowers the value of an honor grade--if it does not deprive it of all significance whatever. An important incentive to mature scholarship is thereby greatly weakened. What is worse, snap courses cheapen the whole character of academic work. They parody true scholarship and bring university study into contempt.

An honor grade ought to represent some solid intellectual achievement. An A should not represent a mediocre student's best nor a good student's second best. It is an obvious corollary that the sliding scale of marking is bad. Its standard is not intelligent mastery of a subject, but the degree of mastery which the average in a particular class happens to have attained.

Which courses are ridiculously easy is all too well known. Some which have been notorious as snaps, as they have been given in the past, are Psychology A, Education B, English 35b, almost any graduate course in French.

But there are plenty of others. And of course the strictures on snap courses apply with equal force to fields of concentration in which degrees with honors are granted too generously.

The whole question of marking is not an integral part of education. Too much importance is attached to it in American schools and colleges. But so long as the marking system stands, so long as it is accorded a dominant place in the educational scheme, so long must it be dealt with seriously. If the University is not going to the extreme of abolishing course grades altogether, it ought to make certain that those grades in every case mean something definite about a student's grasp of a subject. The fact that in a few snap courses an honor grade indicates no real mastery of the field cannot fail to have a bad effect on the whole scholastic standard of the college.