MID-YEAR MORALITY

On May 19 last, the Faculty Council issued the following statement: "Commercial tutoring rests upon a false theory of education and its practices exert a harmful influence." It wasn't a very exciting statement; anyone used to reading Zane Grey or Shakespeare would have thought it pretty cold and colorless. But after allowances were made for the prose style of an official Harvard communication, and when the statement was placed in its proper historical setting, it began to assume tremendous significance.

This was the first time that Harvard had ever officially condemned the Mass. Avenue tutoring schools. For half a century the cram parlors had grown and begat and prospered until they were hundred thousand dollar businesses which had almost as much to do with granting diplomas as the College itself. And across the street in the Yard the only reaction had been closed eyes or shrugged shoulders. Then on May 19 last, the Faculty Council finally recognized that this thing had gone too far, and started out to do something about it.

Since that time, a lot of things have happened, and when they are heaped together they prove pretty conclusively that Harvard can act decisively once it puts its mind to it. New rules were set up against employment of students by tutoring schools, and then in double-quick time the new Supervisors' Bureau was established with the intent that one day it would completely do away with all the skull-duggery in the Square. Contact was established with parents and with prep schools in order that Freshmen might be warned away from wolves and vipers and their ilk. Freshmen were required to hand in their History I notes. There were other things which made sense only in the light of the new attitude on tutoring schools.

One other general step was taken, and it has a good deal of relevance now that the annual mid-year mayhem is approaching. This was the announced intention of a number of professors--including the heads of the large survey courses--to frame exams with a view to making a tutoring school preparation useless, and further to discriminate against obvious cram parlor answers in making out the grades. Attempts in this direction were made last spring at finals, and this year the efforts will be considerably broadened.

It isn't such a hard job to do this as it might seem. Once an examination requires more than the parroting of memorized facts and theories, it has already beaten the tutoring game. A good exam is a test of the comprehension of material, and its method is to require original thought based on the material, or to require a variety of interpretations of the material. Tutoring schools can't help here, because all they can do is pound home a few dozen essential facts, and perhaps hand down a two-bit stock interpretation of these facts. If the exam questions involve looking at the matter in a different context or from an unexpected angle, the tutored scholar is caught flatfooted.

His answers are easy enough to spot. He beats around the bush and pours out his trite interpretations whether they are relevant or not. He writes what he has been told to write beforehand, without using his own brain as a middleman. He uses a few cliches until they turn to ashes in the corrector's mouth.

There are probably a lot of people who don't believe this and maybe there is room for honest disagreement between them and the History I staff, which has issued statements to the effect that "canned" answers were easy to detect. At any rate, there will be a lot of people going to tutoring schools this mid-years, and quite a few of them will pull through. Even so, they're playing a dangerous game of hide-and-seck where all the best hiding places are known only to the professor.