Advanced Standing

When the Admissions Office announced last June that it was admitting a 13-year-old boy to the Class of '59, many students and Faculty members at the University began to exchange disgruntled I-told-you-so's. Back in the spring of 1954, when the Faculty was hotly debating the proposal to establish Advanced Standing, these people had warned that the plan would burden the College with teenagers who were exceedingly intelligent but frightfully immature. Hearing of the 13-year-old freshman, the skeptics now recalled their predictions and asserted that the Yard was becoming a play pen for prodigies.

This resentment against the Advanced Standing program was both misdirected and uninformed. The unusually young student in question entered the College thorough the regular admissions channels and had nothing whatever to do with the Advanced Standing office. More significant, however, is the fact that the Advanced Standing program, during its 20 months of operation, has studiously avoided stirring up any controversies at all--whether of the 13-year-old or any other variety. This week, for example, every academic Department in the College will receive a letter from Harlan P. Hanson '46, director of Advanced Standing, reminding it that course reduction applications--submitted by concentrators who want to reduce their course load next spring in order to pursue special advanced studies--should be filed by the end of Christmas vacation. And so thoroughly accepted has the idea of Advanced Standing become, that not a Departmental eyebrow will be raised.

Course reduction, though it is only a small part of Advanced Standing, is the only aspect of the program that applies directly to upperclassmen. At present more than 20 juniors and seniors--all honors candidates, as the regulations require--have been allowed to carry only three courses this term so that they devote time to individual reading on a subject not covered by a regular course, to an expanded tutorial program, to a course in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, or to any other approved project. The Faculty has specified that a student may "avoid" only two half-courses in this way during his college career, but otherwise there is very little restriction or supervision. The Committee on Advanced Standing has approved almost all course reduction applications that a student's Department has recommended, and it leaves any supervision of the applicant's advanced work to his own tutor. There are no marks, and often no papers or reports, either. Theoretically, any junior or senior honors candidate can qualify for course reduction; in practice, however, a Department will hesitate to recommend a student who is not in Groups I or II.

Since course reduction projects require no administrative surveillance and produce few tangible results, Hanson cannot say just how successful this aspect of Advanced Standing has been. He does know, however, that the number of students participating in the plan is increasing each semester, and that several Departments have expressed satisfaction by recommending that concentrators continue their outside projects for a second term.

Shooting up faster, and sprouting all sorts of administrative problems as it goes, is a second and generally better known feature of Advanced Standing. This provision allows men entering the College to acquire, on the basis of their secondary school work, advanced course credits that may give them immediate sophomore status. In establishing Advanced Standing, one of the Faculty's primary aims was to eliminate repetition in a student's transition from secondary school to college. Accordingly, the plan passed in March, 1954, provided that entering freshmen could get full credit for secondary school courses of recognized College level--equivalents of French 20 or Math la, for example. If a "freshman" demonstrated on his placement tests that he had earned three full-course credits in this way, he would immediately gain official sophomore standing and all its privileges, such as freedom from Physical Training and the right to enter a field of concentration. (He would also, presumably, move into a House, but overcrowding currently makes this impossible.) Meanwhile, if a freshman had only one or two advanced credits he would still benefit, for these would give him priority towards enjoying course reduction when he became a junior or senior.

In this year's freshman class there are only two men who immediately gained sophomore standing by demonstrating that they had earned three full credits in secondary school. There are, however, more than 90 students who have one or two advanced credits, and who will, in two or three years, necessitate a great expansion in the course reduction program.

Still the most novel aspect of Advanced Standing is the provision that could allow a qualified 13-year-old to enter the College directly from the eleventh grade. The Class of 1999 contains five students who skipped the senior year of high school, and a glance at their records helps to dispel any fear that they are either unprepared for Harvard studies or, on the other hand, prepared for nothing but Harvard studies. They are all taking respectable freshman subjects, with three of them, in fact, engaged in math studies more advanced than the elementary Math 1a. None of them is taking his first elementary language course or any other subject that should rightly be taught in high school. Yet their present course schedules, despite a leaning toward the sciences, exhibit the usual dilettante variations of the freshman year, and their outside interests are as "normal" as those of any other freshman. Without such well-rounded intelligence, Hanson emphasizes, these students would never have been admitted to the College in preference to regular applicants with an extra year of experience and maturity.

Twenty months after its founding, Harvard's Advanced Standing program is an important and growing concern. It makes news, however, only by continued calm expansion. Advanced Standing, as Hanson puts it, is not a revolutionary program to redesign American education. It is just a feeling that the traditionally fixed grade levels--freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior in high school and college--are not always the best mold for the education of a young American mind.