Rout of the Magpies

In a recent and wise move, the English Department voted to end the discrete, or building-block, approach to literature which permitted non-honors men to get a degree simply by accumulating, magpie-style, a collection of unrelated courses. Concentrators from the class of 1950, and those who follow, will have to take Divisional examinations, tutorial or no. The Department's action is striking because it brings home one unpleasant consequence of the trend away from tutorial: non-honors candidates graduated by the Department will from now on not be expected to know as much as their pre-war counterparts.

No decline in the standards of the examination itself is planned. Non-honors candidates will simply be asked to answer two of three questions, while honors men will answer them all. Which is a tacit admission that they will be expected to know only two-thirds as much as they once had to Lacking the money to re-institute the ante-bellum miracle of full tutorial, the English Department is at least making sure that its huge enrollment gets an organic grasp of the chopped-up area. For this reason the members of the Department can feel that they made the best of a tough situation; but it must also be unpleasant to watch the standards of one of the University's most famous fields decline before their eyes.