HARVARD'S PROGRESS

Dean Hanford has the right idea in emphasizing the statistics on percentages of honors graduates and failures. Nothing could be more significant than the progress since 1923 from 17.3% graduating with honors in a special field to last year's 31.9% and from 8.5% failures in 1924 to 5.8% last year. This criterion of progress is simple and accurate. The figures mean simply that, owing to changes in the methods of education, more students have been stimulated to do good work, and fewer students have become so maladjusted, uninterested, or lazy that they have not even lived up to the minimum requirements.

Leaving the scholastic standard alone, the ideal for the future must be to get at the large, average group, somehow or other to make them interested and hard-working in their fields. For this all that is suggested in Dean Hanford's report comes from Professor Munn's special committee of advisers,-that students on probation should be released from most of their tutorial work, in order that they may concentrate on doing better on their courses. This is no solution at all, merely a confession of failure.

It is common knowledge that men on probation, and many men off probation who show little interest in their tutorial work, are allowed to go their own way, with the blessing of the tutor thus released from some of his overwork. The committee's suggestion is therefore already, though somewhat tacitly, in effect. But the students in question are not thus given very much stimulus to education. They merely pass their courses, slither past the minimum requirements, and get a degree signifying little more than four years' watching innumerable and golden opportunities go by.

The college does not appear yet to have come to grips with this problem. If men show they are unwilling or incapable of taking advantage of the expensive opportunities of the Tutorial System, do not let them slop through four wasted years. Give them an education they deserve and need; an extra course per year, hour examinations, quizzes, and attendance. This will quickly stimulate the gifted to return into the fold, and will at least give a real, rounded education for the rest. Under this plan, the progress of the past few years, more and more graduates with honors, fewer and fewer failures, would continue.

Under the present scheme, a large group of students are given up as lost before they have a chance. And there appears to be nothing in Dean Hanford's report, or in the suggestions of Professor Munn's committee, which attempts to change their fate, nothing to solve what to us is the major problem of the college.