ON THE RIGHT ROAD

The innovations in the curriculum of Dartmouth College announced yesterday call attention to progress along the most significant trend of development in American education. In part the plan introduced by President Hopkins seems to follow the lines marked out first at Harvard; the comprehensive examination at the end of the Senior year, and the Dean's List principle of special privileges for men with high scholastic records, are the features of the University system. But the Dartmouth plan goes further than anything yet instituted at the University in freeing honor students from the hampering restrictions that bind other undergraduates, and in this respect it sets a precedent which has long stood as the ultimate goal of the tutorial system here.

The plan of permitting honor students full scope for the exercise and development of their talents is by no means new. Columbia, Swarthmore, and Smith have a very similar arrangement, and at Harvard it exists in an undeveloped condition. Distinction men are placed on the Dean's List, their tutors do not limit the time and energy expended on them, and in the Senior year there is a reduction of one course in the work required of them. By an interesting coincidence the novel features of President Hopkins' plan embody substantially the changes proposed at Harvard by the winner of the recent CRIMSON essay contest. By the time the University goes the full length in establishing this new "honor system", course requirements in the final years may be abolished altogether, and the tutor alone will prescribe the work of the student to meet his individual needs.

The Dartmouth system apparently goes this full length, without adopting the tutorial system itself, but it does so at the expense of certain advantages which have not been sacrificed at Harvard. It leaves the curriculum of the average student unchanged, whereas the University provides tutorial instruction for everyone, and it proposes to instruct its honor students partly in small sections, a method evidently inferior, although less expensive, to the individual conference with a tutor.