Time To Think

With final examinations looming on the not-so-distant horizon, it is interesting to note an innovation in the conducting of finals to be tried at Harvard this spring. Students taking examinations in the fields of Government, Economics, History, or History and Literature will be allowed to look over their examination questions for fifteen minutes before the official beginning of the three-hour examination period, at which time the professor in charge will make available the books in which the answers are to be written.

This innovation in examination technique has so much to be said in its favor that the plan is worthy of serious consideration here at Princeton. Many undergraduates enter examinations with such a sense of competing against the time limit that they never really read the list of questions consecutively, and thus fall to get a true perspective of the examination as a whole. Harvard's plan, calling for an extra fifteen minutes for a leisurely perusal of the questions, should enable a student to organize what knowledge he has to the best of his ability, instead of beginning a rash attack on the first question without trying to perceive its possible relation to later questions. A quiet and sane outlook on the examination as a whole will enable the student better to understand what kind of answers the professor probably had in mind when he made out each individual question--and such an insight is often more valuable than last minute factual cramming. --The Princetonian.

(This plan has been adopted not on Final Examinations, only on Divisionals for this year--Ed.)