Shuffle the Sections

The weekly sprint to Warren House has started again. More than 1250 Freshman members of English A face a long winter of neatly-folded themes, conferences with tired instructors, and slow-moving class meetings twice a week. Their sections have been arbitrarily assigned without so much as a nod towards the varying abilities of the students. Skillful writers may very well find themselves classed with other men who have to be coached all the way up from the fundamentals of grammar. The result is an unwieldy and inflexible course, with material geared to its slowest students.

The big trouble is that Freshmen are assigned to English A on the single basis of an Anticipatory Examination. This is tailor-made solely to screen out newcomers whose writing skill already meets with the College's requirement that "By the end of his Freshman year, a student must be able to write . . . clear and concise . . . English." The Anticipatory is the hardest exam the College offers. This year more than 950 students were eligible for the exam. Thirty passed; they were inordinately lucky or exceptionably skillful. The rest, except for those who pull down an A after the first term, will have to sweat out polyglot sections until June.

The answer seems to lie about two and a half blocks to the southwest, in the Holyoke House offices of the department of Romance Languages. For a number of years this department has been plying incoming Freshmen with placement tests, which classify students for the various elementary language courses. It is undoubtedly a fair system; students are sectioned by ability. English A could use a similar method. The single purpose Anticipatory should be scrapped for an English Placement, perhaps something on the lines of the old College Entrance Examination Board Achievement tests. Such an exam would be more difficult to compose and correct, but it would certainly split up the course into sections of comparable ability. Many students might start right off the bat with English Ab. Harried section men would find themselves successfully teaching a whole class, not part of one. And a lot of Freshmen would learn a great deal more from the College's largest course, now far too clumsy to dodder past anything but its required fundamentals.