For Fair Exams

THE COMMISSION of Inquiry should look into Robert J. Kiely's telling a small number of his students a couple of questions and most of the format of his exam in English 166. It will be nice to have the Commission do anything at all, for one thing--it was created four years ago to balance the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities by looking into the causes of demonstrations, but it's never done so yet. More importantly, Kiely's action seems pretty questionable--especially coming from a rising star who's already chairman of the Committee on Undergraduate Education, associate dean of the Faculty, master of Adams House, and chairman of the Committee on General Education, and who ought to set an example for everyone else.

Kiely's error, of course, lay not in revealing the contents of his exam to some students, but in not revealing them to the rest. Similarly, the Biology Department's giving everyone in Bio 21 "A"s on their first hour-exam because all the hour-exams were lost bespoke a certain amount of carelessness, compounded by professors' initial attempt to conceal the loss. But in the end it hurt no one's education and probably pleased most people in the course. They should have lost the final, too.