"A BROADER PLAN"

The Faculty Council's action in broadening the scope of Plan B and allowing advanced students to enter Harvard with less red tape is an added step in the right direction. For some time it has been realized that a standard entrance requirement is in effect unfair to a certain percentage of those seeking admission. Students more developed than the majority of their fellows have entered Harvard with honors, but have been held back for a year by the present unwise blanket system of elementary requirements.

This delay has often caused loss of interest in scholastic work, due, in large measure, to a new absorption in the relatively more entertaining field of extra-curricular activities. In itself this cannot be deplored except in that the former scholastic drive often remains dormant even after the first-year rules have been lifted and the signal is set to go ahead. Extra-curricular interests such as publications, instrumental clubs, debating, the Glee Club and the like can become extremely absorbing and books and scholastic requirements are easily pushed to one side till some later date; a date which grows more and more hazy as time goes on.

If it has no other beneficial effect, the widening of Plan B will at least prevent this unnecessary diverting of the interest of the really advanced freshmen into purely extra-curricular channels. However, taken in its broader light, one can read the beginning of the end of the fallacious system of entrance examinations and the dawning of a day when the general development of a student at his preparatory school will be accepted as a major factor in determining his fitness for admission. This day will undoubtedly come, and it can be safely forecast that the recent action of the Faculty Council has done much to speed the approach of that not too distant and highly desirable era.