Meeting the Judges

By Now, all Senior honors-candidates have learned which adjectives, if any departments have chosen to describe their careers at Harvard. Some have been designated academically "great," some "the greatest"; some will graduate "with praise, "some with nothing at all. Many theses have earned such curious designations as "with great praise minus."

Many students, even the greats and the greatests, are disapointed with the secretive manner in which many departments reveal their judgement. The student feeds the black-jacketed product of his several months' labor into the judging-machine and the machine ejects it two months later, accompanied perhaps by two half-pages of anonymous remarks as though his work had been graded by Harvard herself, not by two particular members of the faculty.

Many of those comments-perhaps the majority-have been written by graders who are all too aware that they will never be obliged to meet the gradees. Often, they permit themselves in their comments a sloppiness and rashness that would be unacceptable if it appeared in the thesis itself, or in any undergraduate paper. Often these comments are more insulting than insightful (one student was told that it would be more rewarding to turn on the TV than no read his thesis) and, generally speaking, they are too short and too carelessly worded to be anything but irritating.

It is perhaps not surprising to hear complaints from those who have done poorly, but even the most successful students have been expressing dissatisfaction. They cannot permit themselves any real pride in their laurels: the grandiloquent words of praise ring false.

As a partial remedy for this unhappy situation, the CRIMSON suggests that meetings be set up between all thesis writers and their readers as a matter of course. These meetings would be held after grades are handed in to the department, but before they are given to the student. Thus, the conference could not turn into a grade-boosting campaign by the student, nor could it become a whining session.

First, since each reader would be forced to meet would be likely to refine his opinions with some care both the author of the thesis and the other reader, he before the conference. Secondly, an hour's threeway discussion could be extremely educational in itself. It could give a student real insights into the strength and weaknesses of his work, and would give him a chance to understand fully his readers' reactions.

At present, the students feel that they have only been playing academic roulette.