General Misconception

Part of President Lowell's lengthened shadow--the general examination system--first met the challenging scrutiny of the History Department several years ago. With deft but shortsighted probes, the department outlined the practical difficulty of crowding too many exams into the end of the senior year. As a remedy, it moved the history general from the senior year to its present unnatural resting place at the end of the junior year--where it now sits, a contradiction to its conceived purpose and a roadblock to late comers into the field.

Straddling the ordinary upperclass course of study as it does, the history general too often proves a frightening deterrent to late transfer applicants into the field. Even though a special committee on occasions grants a one-year examination stay to exceptional cases, most students of history must take the generals irrespective of the date on which they transfer. The prospective late-comer, faced with the unattractive alternative of undergoing a detailed examination in history or transferring to another field, too often chooses the latter.

A more important consideration, the generals do not fulfill their proper function for full-time concentrators in their present position. Coming before students have gained the added historical insight that thesis work gives in the senior year, the examinations now function principally to help weed out weak honors candidates. This is questionable justification when compared to President Lowell's envisaged purpose of the general examination: to tie together the student's whole course of study.

The History Department believes the senior year, crammed with both specials and generals, overtaxes the student. Yet there is ample time to prepare for generals between the thesis deadline in April and the beginning of examinations in the middle of May. If he faced the generals in his senior year, the history student would be able to devote that month and a half to collecting the strands of four years of diverse education. And he would go into the general examination, not to meet rephrased final examination questions as is now the case, but to set down a four-year proof that he had mastered the field of history.