Computer Games

WHILE THE LINES for high-tech video adventures at Elsie's and Tommy's Lunch continued to grow with startling speed this semester, a sizeable portion of the Class of '85 busied itself by devising excuses for not playing the other computer game in town--the College's new quantitative reasoning requirement.

Though confusion seems to dominate the entire QRR operation, one absurd fact has emerged from beneath the mountain of tangled print-outs in the Science Center basement: Almost 200 freshman face a term on academic probation if they do not return to school early next fall and pass an exam which they failed to knock off during the past nine months.

Academic probation is Harvard's equivalent of your seventh grade grammar teacher's third dirty look: "One more problem from you, junior, and it's out the door." Short of requiring withdrawal, the College can do nasty things like kick people off of sports teams and force their by-lines out of undergraduate publication. On paper it all sounds rather dire, but who can take the administrators seriously when they're threatening to boot one out of every nine people in a single class? More importantly, are students going to learn anything about computers as a result of all this excitement?

The interesting aspect of the QRR mess is not whether proctors do or don't give improper assistance during the administration of tests, though this has understandably been a hot topic of conversation among freshmen Attention should in instead be focused on why a fundamentally good idea has resulted in such havoc.

AS SEVERAL UNDERGRADUATE teaching assistants have pointed out, students share some of the blame for the problems with the QRR. Freshmen are asked to complete two straightforward exams, which test little more than whether they spent a few hours reading and memorizing readly available manuals on data integration and simple programming. The exams were given many times since September and apparently if you were any where close to getting the right answer on the actual computing exercise, people were around to give you a helpful above.

The Core planners, on the other hand, seemed to encourage procrastination and befuddlement Rather than asking people to report for tests on specific days, they tossed around ridiculous threats about forced withdrawals When one Freshman Dean's Office administrator said that no one who failed to meet the requirement in its in its maiden run year was actually singed by the Ac Pro brand, a QRR functionar, that as far as he knows, this year's delinquents will get burned, even if they enroll in a semester-long course on introductory computer programming.

Freshmen, and sophomores who faced the requirement last year, have expressed reactions to the QRR ranging from indifference to genuine anger. But they agree almost unanimously that the exercise does little to ensure that computophobes will retain any facility at the keyboard or ever return to the terminal room. The exams demand only temporary mental photocopying and a brief encounter with the machine itself--not an experience likely to yield affection for the Polymorphic Programming Language. If Harvard thinks it's important to expose students to the wonders of the computer, the school should force everyone to take a half-year course on the subject, as is done with expository writing.

This solution would be painful, especially for those who have little immediate interest in acquiring the skills offered by Quantitative Reasoning A and Applied Sciences 11. But if what we hear about a space shuttle in every garage before the end of the century is true, learning the basics is probably inevitable, and Harvard should teach them efficiently and fairly. Perhaps then some of those poor souls throwing away their guaranteed student loans on Pac-Man and Alpine Ski could be lured into more productive space-age pursuits.