Off Key

Naturally enough, a good many of those who answered the Student Council tutoring school questionnaire, remarked that they didn't think the benefits of tutoring quite worth the price. Such skeptics will feel better on learning that the tutors themselves believe in them as satisfactory methods of raising that grade, even if they do get the service at cost. When the patent medicine man drinks his own poison, that's news.

Once upon a time one of Professor Merriman's unofficial colleagues was taking a course. Regularly he appeared in class, sat slumped in his seat for the hour, made some scrawls in his notebook, and sauntered off to pass the evening at the fashionable watering spots of metropolitan Boston.

But when the exams came, lo what a change was there! He took the assignment and gave it to one of the humbler members of his staff. The slave took the books and retired into the silence, returning presently with the content of the course chewed, thoroughly digested, and regurgitated upon five or six type-written sheets for our hero's convenience.

In the answer to his questionnaire, one ninny paused in a defense of the tutoring schools to remark that the purpose of a college education is to "make you a gentleman", his definition of a gentleman being apparently one who pays another to do what he should do himself. This is not such a bad definition. But although the tutor's method of studying for the exam may not have yielded him the maximum intellectual return, it may be doubted that purely social ambitions drove him to seek further learning. If he went to learn, the tutee had better recant, for he is betrayed. It not, the Professor giving the course must feel very flattered. THERSITES