ENTER CORNELL

The academic year 1928-1929 will see the College of Arts and Sciences of Cornell University adopt a pre-examination discontinuance of formal class attendance which is patterned upon the Harvard Reading Period. The arrangement at Cornell is variously modified to make the offspring more conservative than the parent. Their hereditary similarities appear in the resolution of the Cornell faculty:

"That for the academic year of 1928-1929, formal instruction (including class exercises and laboratories) may be discontinued one week before term examinations begin, it being understood that the members of the faculty will be available for consultation at the regular hours designated for class instruction, and that an examination or equivalent exercise shall be required of all students during the examination period."

The ambition of the Cornell plan is primarily preventative; it will attempt merely, avers the Cornell Sun, to prevent the fevered cramming that precedes examinations. Its effort will be directed to a sound recapitulation of knowledge delivered, rather than reliance on the individual for a period of self-education.

In the definite availability of the faculty the Cornell plan anticipates what has been the only flaw in the Reading Period. At Harvard the tutors, who might be expected to give significance in terms of divisionals and fields of concentration to the final harvesting of a half-year's study, cannot be consulted, while the section man, often as like to the tutor as the captain to the crew of the captain's gig, keeps precarious office hours.

The limitations of the Cornell plan may prove depriving where full success, measured in terms of potentiality, may be only half-success. It will be very much at the mercy of different instructors in the matters of attendance, reading, theses, and the like. In this respect it contrasts with the Reading Period, which insures a certain regular treatment of the interval by all courses that are not either elementary in nature or primarily for Freshmen. The Cornell lecturer can require attendance throughout the period, or he can place his faith where Harvard has, in assigned reading and study emancipated of the instructors.

The Cornell Sun, which in March of this year began its now rewarded fight for the experiment, is to be congratulated. In its present tentativeness, however, the Cornell plan has left just beyond reach the greater usefulness that Harvard, from results attained, has come to expect of a reading period.