Tabs On Discretion

When the Senior Tutors set up the decanel shops in the Houses, the first things they unpacked were pieces of white cardboard called "daycards." Daycard is a euphemism for the complete academic and disciplinary record of every student in the College. And in a corner of the card is the attendance record of teach student who has taken a Freshman course as an upperclassman.

While report of upperclass attendance in these courses satisfies a Dean's hankering for data, it certainly defies consistency. No one marks the roll at upperclass lecture courses. It is presumed that after a year's exposure to the Harvard lecture system, students know how much they can gain from it. They may prefer to spend the lecture hour doing the reading or sipping coffee, and as long as the practice doesn't lead to probation, it's their privilege.

The upperclassman's power of discretion is not dulled by his choice of a course regularly open to Freshmen. But let him use it, and the attendance box on his daycard sports an ugly cluster of goose eggs. He is the victim of an illogical and discriminatory ruling, which keeps tabs on him in some courses and not in others.

With the decentralization of the Dean's office, it would now take a clerical miracle to get this attendance data to each Senior Tutor's office, so the Administrative Board is considering stripping upperclassmen's daycards of the attendance box. But the Board, and its advisors on the Student Council, still want upperclass attendance taken, to be stored for "future reference" in the Registrar's office.

They give two reasons: First, that course monitors could not avoid counting upperclass noses unless all the upperclassmen sat together. While such segregation is undesirable, it is also unnecessary. Upperclassmen can be assigned seats with no obligation to dutifully occupy them, and the course monitors can simply leave these places blank on their seating charts, to be filled in only if the upperclassman is on probation.

Second, the Deans believe the extra record should be on hand in case they must pass judgment on students. But it would seem that the new, more personalized decanal system should furnish evaluations of students adequate enough to make a lecture attendance record unimportant.

As long as some change in upperclass attendance is necessary, it might as well be consistent and complete. To show their faith in the upperclassman's ability to budget his time, the Deans should abolish upperclass attendance records altogether.