Advisory Council Asks University to Drop Exams for Grad Students in Final Terms

Second and third-year graduate students will no longer take final exams if the University approves a report submitted last night by the Graduate Advisory Council.

The Council received the report last week from Melvin Richter 3G' and commended it highly. Richter, who was president of the group in 1947-48, has been working on the study for two years.

Should Encourage, Stimulate

He recommended that graduate students be relieved of three-hour course exams after their first year and suggested several alternative methods.

"The particular concern of the Graduate Schools is with the advancement of knowledge," Richter said. "They should encourage and stimulate the individual to set his own goals and pursue them."

Exams do not foster original research and discovery, he said. "Highest intellectual achievement does not come from a military discipline, but from the student's own belief in the importance of his work."

Richter called exams a mass-production method of evaluation and warned that "the pressures produced by administrative needs may defeat the fundamental purposes of education."

"Examinations," he said, "are satisfactory in the qualities they demand. They stress memory and reproduction of course content. This does not encourage original scholars; the student forgets what he crams.

"In short, these examinations reward qualities irrelevant to scholarship."

Richter admitted that anarchy in the administration won't do the job. "With so many students, the faculty needs same bases for judging them in their first year."

Because of this, the report suggests that exams be kept for first-year students. It also recommends four alternatives for course exams:

Alternatives Proposed

1) A course paper of series of small essays; 2) an oral test; 3) instructor's evaluation; and 4) laboratory-type examinations.

"Suggestive ingeunity and experimentation are needed," Richter concluded. The report has been submitted to President Conant and President W.K. Jordan and to Deans Wild and Cronkhite of the Harvard and Radcliffe Graduate Schools.