Council Asks New Grading System; GE Adds Seven Courses for '48-49

Complete revamping of the course-numbering system and the addition of seven new courses in General Education provide the two most important features of the new courses Catalogue, due for distribution to students this week.

Other vital change in the curriculum for 1948-49 will be the reinstatement of the prewar rule that certain courses must be taken as a whole rather than in two separate and not necessarily consecutive halves. During the war years, scrambled academic schedules necessitated the relaxation of this rule.

Harried undergraduates will also be glad to learn that the academic calendar, which has been slowly readapting itself to a peacetime college, will, by June 1949, find itself back to normal. College opens on September 27, fall term exams run until February 4, and the last student will not finish spring finals until June 15.

G.E. Program Expanded

The General Education program will get another boost in size next year, as two new courses in the Humanities, four in the Social Sciences, and one in the Natural Sciences will swell the total offerings of the program to 24. President Conant's course on the growth of the experimental sciences, formerly a middle course group open only to Juniors and Seniors, has been shifted to the first group and will be open to Freshmen as a full-year course.

The new Natural Science course, entitled "Organic Evolution," will be conducted by Alfred S. Romer, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In the Humanities, courses in "Art in Man's Environment" and "The Idea of Progress in Western Literature and Thought" will compensate for the omission of Humanities 12a next fall.

A study of "Economics for the Citizen" by Seymour E. Harris, and two courses on the civilization of India and the Near East in the Social Sciences round out the new offerings.