FITTING THE MOULD

Worst of the problem children which harass a college curriculum are the survey courses, and at Harvard they are holy terrors. Through the years they have constantly grown until today they tend, because of their own unmanageable hugeness, to fall apart into disunified sections whose only point of similarity is subject material.

Caught at the core of this rotten situation, students struggle to get into an "easy" section whose instructor gives a high percentage of A's and B's. Far too many survey courses have little check on that "easy" man or on his counterpart, the "hard" one. Marking is up to the discretion of the instructor, and since the personal equation is inevitable, rank injustice and disunity result.

One outstanding exception is furnished by the pioneering work of the Psychology A staff. From masses of charts, graphs, and experiments of all sorts, they have devised a sliding scale for marking papers that is a triumph of refined and scientific scholarship. Marks, numerical or letter, mean comparatively little; the student's rank as a member of the course is all that matters. A distribution curve based on long experience is worked out before the course starts, and by his rank each student is fitted into his rightful place on that curve. Hence the continuity of the course average is kept constant from year to year. To preclude any variation of marking among the section men, the instructors do not grade merely the papers of the men in their own section, but grade a single question in each of the blue books. Hence coordination of marking is maximized, and there is no room for variation. Psychology A is a unified whole, no mass of isolated classes.

A few other courses, among them Physics C and Biology D, have comparable marking systems; but the rest, though they may shout to the skies that they have complete coordination among their sections, can give no air-tight proof of fact. They can only refer vaguely to the "common sense" of their instructors. True, the common sense of a great many staffs is extremely good, but other courses have failed utterly to bring any order or continuity out of the various theories and marking systems of their section men.

To prevent the further disintegration of its gawky problem children, the University must establish some stricter rule of discipline and wipe out the injustice that exists in far too many courses. Psychologists at Harvard have worked out an excellent system of marking for large classes. Yet with pitifully few exceptions, the other large courses have failed to take advantage of their refined and scholarly research. They prefer to go their own antiquated gait, leaving their marking system open to chance and injustice.