Yale Advance Standing Plan Begins in '55

Yale will inaugurate a limited advanced standing program next fall, according to William C. DeVane, Dean of Yale College. The plan includes exemptions from distribution requirements, course credits for secondary school work, and provisions for graduation after thee years.

Yale has thus become the first of the Big Three after Harvard to implement recommendations of the Blackmer Report, published in January 1953. The report offered plans to make smoother the transition from secondary school college, and seven-year program for the "superior student."

Two types of credit will be offered under the new program. "Special or distributional credit" allows students to omit required language and science courses if they receive outstanding grades on college entrance examinations. It does not, however, reduce the total number of courses a student at Yale must take in a given year.

The second type of credit allows a student who achieves high grades in all his freshman courses and who has received qualifying scores from the entrance exams, to get his secondary school work credited as Yale courses. A student with three such credits may enter the junior class directly after his freshman year.

Simultancous with Harvard

Yale's plan will be put into operation at the same time as Harvard's Special Standing Program, approved by a vote of the Faculty in March. Harvard's plans, include course reduction for outstanding honors students and advising and scholarship policies for advanced students.

BeVane described the plan as a "clarification and systematization of present procedures for early graduation," rather than as a new program. "Early graduation has been allowed to exceptional men for a good many years at Yale."

Yale's provisions for class-skipping differ from the University's special Standing Program, which admits qualified 11th graders as freshmen or high school seniors into the sophomore class with House membership.

To qualify for sophomore standing, however, Harvard applicants must attain outstanding marks on the placement tests for at least three of the fields of Biology, Chemistry, English, History, Languages, Mathematics, and Physics. This provision is similar to Yale's requirement that all-round achievement precede promotion from the freshman to the junior class.