Harvard Won't Offer A.P. Students M.A. Degree Despite Yale Decision

Harvard will not follow the lead of a recent Yale decision to offer the M.A. degree to fourth year advanced standing. The Faculty has considered such action for over two years, but Wilcox feels that "present policy will remain."

This action has arisen from the problem of advanced standing sophomores who complete their A.B. requirements in three years, but choose to remain as undergraduates for a fourth year.

The Yale decision was announced Griswold three weeks ago. Yale will standing to receive both their A.B. and M.A. degrees upon completing four years as undergraduates.

Yale is being forced to offer the M.A. according to J. Petersen Elder. Dean of the Graduate School, because, unlike Harvard, it has no middle level courses which are open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Yale's policy will allow advanced standing seniors to enter upper level graduate courses while retaining their undergraduate status.

Wilcox feels that the Harvard situation is much more complicated, and is, in part, "a semantic question." Both advanced standing seniors in their fourth year and those who enter the Graduate School after three years often take exactly the same courses.

Standing Agreement

For advanced standing students who wish to remain in the College after completing their A.B. requirements, there is now a standing agreement between the College and the GSAS to credit toward the graduate degrees "appropriate courses" taken in the fourth year. According to Wilcox, the courses are "bracketed and no longer count for the undergraduate degree."

This present agreement has evolved from a long series of Faculty discussions concerning the fourth year of advanced standing. The problem has existed since the initial Faculty legislation creating the AP program, in which Wilcox feels the language was "very unclear." Wilcox first made the proposal to offer the M.A. in the spring of 1960, when several AP students wanted to remain in Houses but wanted to "be graduate students."