Med Students Ask Faculty To Aid Independent Study

Twenty second-year Harvard Medical School students will seek faculty cooperation in a program of independent study that they propose to substitute for the school's regular lectures and laboratory sessions.

The details of the plan have not been worked out yet, but the group has decided to ask the faculty to approve their plan as "a controlled experiment in self-education." The group met yesterday to consider proposals to remedy what a spokesman called "excessive amounts of time wasted in inefficient lectures and labs."

The dissidents will ask the faculty to supervise their independent study program and to offer facilities for less rigid, student-run laboratories.

However, seven of the 20 insurgents are considering boycotting the present lecture and lab system, and establishing the independent study program themselves, if the faculty does not approve the plan.

One of the members of the group commented that faculty curriculum committees periodically review their teaching methods but "certainly won't institute radical changes for next semester."

"We're fed-up, we want to start learning on our own, and we simply have to ask the faculty now to initiate a program they probably wouldn't propose on their own," he continued. However, the spokesman noted that the students would not ask the faculty to exempt them from the traditional examinations.

Need More Time

Medical students spend seven to eight hours daily in lectures and laboratories. According to a member of the group, they do not have enough time outside of class to master and investigate the "core material that the lectures and labs present so badly."

The group feels that lectures tend to transmit inaccurately and imprecisely information that could be gleaned from textbooks and periodicals. Furthermore, textbooks and periodicals. Furthermore, the labs "waste time" on experiments that "have little relevance to the science of medicine," the spokesman explained.

The 20 dissenters also expressed the hope that small conference groups of students and faculty would be created as an alternative to lectures as a teaching device. At present conference groups serve merely as supplements to lectures