TF's Committee Enacts Dry-Run Admissions Job

A group of teaching fellows had the chance this week to impersonate Harvard's equivalent of the Fates--the Admissions Committee.

The thirty teaching fellows, culled from various departments met Monday to accept or reject the files of five applicants for admission to Harvard College.

The files were long dead, however, taken from the casebook of former applicants which the Admissions Office uses to aid high school admission counselors. Names of the five were fictitious.

The purpose of the little game organized by Dean Glimp's office, was to acquaint the teaching fellows with the admissions process--"to let them see how they got the students they got," Glimp said yesterday.

The teaching fellows split up into three subcommittees. After the meetings, the mock committees compared their decisions with those of the Admission's committee.

The teaching fellows came 'very close' to duplicating the action of the Admissions Committee, Dean K. Whitla, associate director of admissions, said yesterday. Each of the subcommittees, he said agreed with the actual decisions in four of the five cases.

But the teaching fellows had one advantage over their counterparts: they also checked the Harvard performance of the applicants they admitted.

The teaching fellows were drawn from the German, Romance Languages, and Mathematics Departments, and from the Expository Writing program. But they showed no tendency to split along departmental lines, Whitla said.

The mock committee was only a trial, Whitla said, but it may be repeated if there is "serious interest" in it.