New Freshmen Who Fail Test Will Take Special Expos Class

The Expository Writing Office will soon require students who fail a Freshmen Week placement test to take a full year of writing classes.

Beginning next fall, students who do not pass the test will take a special remedial course, Express 5, in the first semester and then a regular Expos course in the spring.

"Expos 5 is coming about because we have discovered that the number of people arriving at Harvard unprepared to write is on the increase," Christine Flug, an Expos tutor and the program's designer, said yesterday. "The problems are getting severe nationwide, and it is silly to pretend that it doesn't touch our people," she explained.

The office now places students in the remedial class, Expos 14HF, after they fail a regular Expos class, or sends them to a special tutor, Flug said.

The system was backwards," Flug said. "Students had to sweat through an entire term of frustration and disaster before going to a special class [The tutoring system] was inefficient in terms of time and it was insufficient. Right now it's a nightmare," she added.

"We made progress but we didn't make nearly as much progress as we could in a full-term program," Flug said.

"We are still discussing with the Freshman Dean's Office how we are going to [test students]," Flug added. "It's going to be expensive to do this. We'll have to hire some extra readers, and we'll probably start with the essays of students who have the lowest SAT scores and read up from there as long as we have time and money."

The remedial class will be split into two sections, one for foreign students learning English as a second language and another for American students with poor writing skills, Flug said. The office is looking for a special teacher in the foreign student class.

Flug said she started the program this fall because of the large number of students who were coming to her with severe problems.

The Expos office is expecting to have about 15 foreign students and 20 to 30 American students in the classes, Flug said.

"This is part of a more systematic look at the problem than has been done in the past," said Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid I Fred Jewett '57. Jewett added that Harvard students writing skills have been declining over the past few years.

"There is less emphasis on writing in schools in the country and there has been an increase in foreign students admitted to Harvard," he explained.

The Envelope, Please

In addition to selection through the placement test, students will be able to volunteer for admission to the class, Flug said. They will receive a letter describing the remedial program during the summer.

Expose teachers will also recommend for the course students whose writing problems are not detected by these tests, Flug added.

"It will be a few years until find exactly what works," Flug said. "We're going to play it by ear," she added.

Flug said several other Ivy League colleges have similar programs and that Dartmouth's program was used as an example "Dartmouth gave us a lot of assistance," she said.