DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

Every year there are in the College about a hundred and fifty students crouched over dog-fish and cats in the laboratories of Zoology three; approximately the same number wallow in the odors of other and alcohol wafted about the laboratory of Chemistry 2a. A smaller, but still considerable group spends its afternoons fulfilling the requirements of Zoology 4 and 5, and of Chemistry 3a and 33. These students estimate the time put in on their laboratory work variously; taking into consideration all the available facts, it is not too much to say that the man of average mentality will spend from nine to fifteen hours weekly in the lab, three hours in lectures, an hour or two in laboratory conferences, and from two to five hours in study of texts, provided that he is working for an honor grade. Thus, to learn the subject and receive a good mark, it is often necessary to spend a total of twenty-five hours a week on one subject, and it is hardly possible to escape with less than fifteen frenzied hours of effort.

While this scrambling and scurrying is going on in the laboratories, students in other fields are taking German B and French B, two courses which are regarded as very difficult in point of time spent. The men who choose these roads to the modern languages are supposed to spend five hours a week in attending the stated meetings of their class; presumably, a serious student would expend two hours a night besides, in preparing of the recitations and in doing the reading; an exceptionally hard worker might devote three hours five times a week to the study of his French or German. Thus the maximum estimate of time required for these courses is twenty hours a week. There is however, one great difference between the time spent in the languages and the similar effort made in the sciences; the student who takes German B or French B and passes, receives credit is granted but a single credit.

The hocus-pocus in the departments of Chemistry and Biology which results in this unpleasant combination of single credit and intolerably heavy laboratory assignments has several unfortunate effects. Those students who do the work conscientiously, assimilating the material thoroughly and receiving a good mark, are forced either to neglect their other courses or to spend so much time on their various studies that they become, in the purest sense, grinds. It is not at all uncommon to find men who are taking two heavy laboratory courses, a Physics course with a reasonable laboratory, period, and some reading course for distribution; such an individual will spend his mornings rushing from the lab to a lecture and back; he will eat his box lunch in Mallinckrodt, where the rest of his day is passed; he will then return to spend the evening over work for any or all of his four courses, or in preparing for one of the frequent science course quizzes, and will finally drop into bed with the loud ticks of the alarm clock beating on his weary and tortured brain. On the other hand, there are men who refuse to sacrifice all for science. Although they do an amount of work which would be considered satisfactory in most other fields, in Chemistry or Biology they miss about half the course, and are obliged to make a desperate rush at the end of the term in order to escape a flunk.

Although the description of these heavier Chemistry and Biology courses in the catalogue almost invariably trail off into a coy "six hours of laboratory work per week required", many instructors and almost all students will testify that this is an absurd statement. It is conclusively established that these courses require as much time as German B and French B; there are only two roads now open to the Departments involved. They may, on the one hand, grant two course credit for their courses: this, of course, will require other adjustments; requirements for concentration will have to be altered to correspond; the double credit may be arranged by separating the courses involved into a laboratory course and a lecture course; concentration might then demand as many curses of both sorts as it does of the one sort now in use. One the other hand, the time needed in laboratory might be cut down until it is actually the six hours now stated. Either of these arrangements would give the scientific student an opportunity both to do his work and indulge in outside activities of one sort or another at present he is the forgotten man of the College in all truth; by taking speedy action, and by the exercise of a little ingenuity, the Departments of Chemistry and Biology should be able to give him such reasonable working hours as he has in Physics courses; if they cannot, they are driven to the other alternative of allowing double credit.