Advanced Standing--117 Years

The Faculty will have ample grounds for argument today when the Educational Policy Committee presents its report. Stimulants for debate are the controversial proposals for advanced standing, a new placement policy, and course reduction. The proposed plan has been hailed as the most significant academic change since General Education; yet, interestingly enough, the College has tried each proposal in one form or another sometime in the past century and a quarter.

In 1836, for example, a student could skip as many semesters as he was capable, provided he could pay the bursar fifteen dollars for every term passed. A "good moral character" was also necessary if the student was to have full approval from the Faculty. By 1857 course requirements had tightened, leaving the scholar little choice in his curriculum. The only lenient measure was a course reduction that allowed the student's father to request that such subjects as Greek or Latin be omitted from his son's long list of required languages. With the Civil War came a trend toward less rigid requirements and encouragement of a three year program.

During President Eliot's team, in fact, nearly twenty percent of the student body graduated in three years. A majority of the Faculty favored this policy since it allowed students to enter graduate schools at an early age. To their way of thinking, the professional schools, not the College, were the important goal. One Faculty majority report proclaimed, "In those great departments of education which lie beyond college walls . . . prodigious changes have taken place within the last twenty years, and are still going on!" But their critics were not quiet. Arguing that further course reduction would inevitably lower the standards of the College and degrade the Bachelor's degree, a minority warned, "We must begin again at the foot of the long and toilsome hill which we have slowly climbed."

As Eliot's influence was considerable in continuing the liberalized program of rapid advancement, so was President Lowell influential in bringing it to a halt. In his 1909 inaugural address from a stage on the west front of University Hall he attacked the assumption that college was a mere fill-in between high school and professional school, stating "the college ought to produce, not defective specialists, but men intellectually well rounded, of wide sympathies and unfettered judgement."

Although Lowell discouraged the policy of permitting men to enter as Sophomores or higher on the basis of tests, the use of exams for advanced placement in specific courses continued. The announcement in 1921 that the College would give credit for by-passed courses only at the end of the senior year, and then only after a thorough study of each case, stifled any undergraduate hopes of loafing through the last year. And instead of great mobs applying for the optional tests, there were only one or two yearly inquiries. After continued disuse and general lack of interest the Faculty voted to abolish anticipatory credit in 1934. Until today, there have been no formal moves toward its reinstatement.

But a system of course reduction had been building up since 1924 to satisfy the needs of more capable students. Faculty members heatedly argued whether students would loaf or work in the extra time provided by reduction. When the Faculty passed the program in 1924 they specified that extra time was only for guided work under the tutor, not for shortening a student's term of residence. But a few still had visions of beer drinking replacing listening to lectures, and a Student Council report in 1926 warned of the dangers of a "glorified country club." In action, however, the program seemed to work well, hindered only by administrative details. The hardest strain came with the last war.

The fevered pitch of the early months in 1941 did little to help the course reduction program. While students pleaded "Pass me, please!" on their blue books, the draft daily carried away its share of tutors. Pressure was on to get a degree and get it quick. As it became increasingly difficult to patch the system with temporary measures, and to hold uniform control, the Faculty voted in 1942 to give the power of course reduction to the individual departments by allowing credit for tutorial.

When the Faculty begins debate this afternoon they will have a broad background of conflicting precedents for their discussion. But the past holds more than amusement, and the Faculty may find valuable Jessons in the failures, and successes, of previous proposals. CLIFF F. THOMPSON