Student Reps Defend April Hourlies at CUE Meeting

Undergraduate Council members formally protested a faculty proposal to rescind the senior honors hourly option at the final meeting of the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) yesterday.

Members of the council's academics committee criticized the faculty proposal, which would eliminate the option currently offered to honors seniors who are taking general examinations. These seniors are allowed to take an April hourly exam in place of the regularly scheduled final in courses being taken for concentration credit.

Because of "several serious inequities in the present system," faculty members and administrators are seeking to cancel the policy "for purely academic reasons," said David Pilbeam, associate dean for undergraduate education.

The rule change would apply for courses beginning next year and would not affect current spring courses.

The current arrangement was originally conceived to prevent finals from interfering with the concentration's general exams or with the writing of the senior thesis.

The system was also designed to ensure that course material covered in general exams is not repeated in specific course finals. Honors hourlies usually occur in April before general exams, which are administered in May by individual departments to honors concentrators.

But faculty administrators said they now believe that double-testing is not a danger since the material covered in the exams of many spring semester courses is unrelated to material in generals.

"Students concentrating in History are presently being granted testing options in fields like Moral Reasoning, and Romance Language concentrators can take April hourlies in British and Irish Poetry," said CUE faculty representative Jeffrey Wolcowitz.

Wolcowitz also said that final exams did notinterfere with general exams and theses sincegeneral exams tended not to be given during examor reading period, and theses are generally duewell before the end of the semester.

Faculty administrators said they were alsoconcerned that April testing policies are notuniform for different concentrations. CUEstatistics show that more than 80 percent of allstudents eligible for the exam option come fromonly six concentrations: Economics, English,Government, History, History and Literature, andSocial Studies.

"Students are in the exact same courses, butare eligible or ineligible for April hourliessimply because they have different majors,"Wolcowitz said.

Faculty administrators, including Dean of theCollege L. Fred Jewett '57, said that by taking anhonors hourly, students from these concentrationsreceive an unfair advantage over students noteligible for the hourlies. Taking early examsallows students to receive grades early--aprivilege that Jewett said would be an advantagein gaining admittance to end-of-the-year honorsocieties, including Phi Beta Kappa.

Pilbeam added that April exams would also givea student an unfair advantage since students canboost grades by taking the final or doing extrawork if they have poor showings on the Aprilhourly. "Doubleshots for getting a good grade area serious inequity," he said.

After faculty representatives presented theircase, student members of the academics committeequickly protested the proposal.

"Obviously a large number of our constituentsare in favor of the testing policy, and we don'twant to deny them an option they've already beenformally granted," Todd Flynn '88, chairman of thecommittee, told the CUE. "The legislation shouldbe altered to solve any inequities, not dissolvedcompletely."

Flynn said that the committee was concernedthat seniors in their final semester would not beable to count spring courses for concentrationrequirements unless April exams established honorsgrades before the end of the semester.

He also said that the decision to rescind Aprilhourlies was too sudden, and the AcademicsCommittee needed more time to address and monitorstudent concerns. Pilbeam asked the AcademicsCommittee to appear before the Faculty Council onMay 11 to make a pitch against the proposal beforeit appears on the docket of the final facultymeeting, which will be held on May 17.

Also on the agenda of yesterday's CUE meetingwas a discussion of the CUE Guide. Several membersof the academics committee suggested that theannual course guide list the names of courseswhose professors declined to participate in theCUE evaluation process. About 35 courses refusedto be evaluated last year, in some cases becausecourses were deemed too small for inclusion.

But Pilbeam said peer pressure would not be aneffective way to increase participation. "We haveto accept the `no's," he said. He said the onlyway to boost the scope of the evaluation processis "to keep nagging" professors