New Proposal Advanced for Gen Ed Grade

The final grade in General Education Ahf should count towards every freshman's rank standing, Byron Stookey Jr. '54, assistant director of Advanced Standing, said yesterday.

Stookey called the present system "an administrative game in which the student is allowed to hold one grade behind his back." Gen Ed Ahf is a required course, Stookey said, and "there is no reason why the Freshmen should be marked on a different scale from everyone else at the College."

Current System

Under the current "best-eight-grades" ranking system, a student can substitute Ged Ed Ahf mark for the grades he receives in his lowest half course. Or, the Gen Ed Ahf mark can replace half of any full course grade.

Although he had not heard about Stookey's plan to change the status of the course, Harold C. Martin, Director of General Education Ahf, agreed yesterday that counting the Gen Ed grade towards rank list standing is the "sensible thing to do."

The grades in all courses fulfilling basic requirements for the year should influence rank standing, Martin said.

He added that any change in the system would probably require a decision by the entire Faculty. When the present system was approved in 1951, the Faculty decided to count Gen Ed Ahf as a half-course but did not consider the question of credit. The substitution rule is an "accident" stemming from the original Faculty decision, Martin said.

The question of the rank list status of Gen Ed Ahf has arisen partly because of the Freshman seminar program. Since the majority of credit seminars are ungraded and run for one term, most students in the program finish the year with eight instead of 8 1/2 grades.

Many freshmen in the seminars feel that they are being cheated out of the half-course substitution, Stookey said. He argued that it would be more sensible not to allow course substitution at all than to make exceptions for individual cases.