From Cramming to Comprehension

Back in the Gold Coast days, when tutoring schools around the Square offered packaged educations and guaranteed Harvard diplomas, College students could spend much of their time in New York or Bermuda and still pick up their "gentleman's C's."

"Diplomas by Harvard--Tutoring by Wolff," proclaimed Wolff's Tutors. The College Tutoring Bureau boasted, "We are now ready to serve you with our Notes, Outlines, and Liberal Translations," and the motto of the University Tutors was "Midnight Oil, Loathsome Toil."

The "tute" schools provided their clientele with ghost-written papers, specially abridged textbooks, and stolen lecture notes and exam questions. By the 1930s, it was estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the undergraduate body patronized these houses of intellectual ill-fame.

"Pay as You Pass"

Today the cram schools are no more. They and their often-successful attempts to beat the academic system have been replaced by the Bureau of Study Counsel, which may not advertise as well but which, from a long view, is unquestionably more valuable to any student. It is the Bureau's function to help men make the sometimes-difficult adjustment to life at Harvard and, at the same time, to enable the University's faculty to do a better job of teaching.

Where the cram schools did a man's work for him, the Bureau, through counseling conferences and private tutoring, helps him to stand on his own feet. In place of abridged textbooks and digested lecture notes, the Bureau runs a semi-annual reading course to encourage faster reading and better study organization.

In addition, says William G. Perry, Jr., '35, Director of the Bureau, "Our seminars with interested faculty members and advisors transmit the kind of educational problem we meet to those people on the teaching end of the learning process."

The Bureau of Study Counsel was organized in 1948 to fill the legitimate need of extra-curricular help for men with academic problems. Oven a period of sixty years an ever-increasing number of students had succumbed to the enticement of the tutoring schools, which, with their "Pay as You Pass" plans, had a business grossing $250,000 annually.

The Square's educational bordelles had been experiencing difficulty, however. Their first major trouble came in 1933, when Macmillan, Houghton Miffin, Harper Brothers, and Ginn and Company brought suit against the College Tutoring Bureau charging that their abridging of text-books constituted a violation of copyright laws. A federal district court awarded the publishers damages and enjoined the College Tutors from continuing such practices.

Traps and Common Law

In 1935 the University had Manter Hall, no longer under the commendable direction of its founder, William ("The Widow") Nolen '87, and the University Tutors legally enjoined from selling lecture notes, the property of the University by common law. A Student Council investigation followed, condemning the activities of the tutoring schools.

Then in 1939, the CRIMSON launched a campaign seeking abolition of the cram pariors and banned their advertising from its columns. Within a month, the University threatened to expel any student who sold his lecture notes. Professors laid traps in their exams for students who used canned answers provided by tute schools. Finally, in 1940, all outside tutoring was banned.

Bureaucracy of Specialists

Meanwhile, to aid those students who needed legitimate help, the College had already established the Bureau of Supervisors in 1938. Graduate students, proctors, and upperclassmen served as "supervisors" in their fields. Directed by Stanley Salmen, who had led the CRIMSON's campaign against tutoring schools as an undergraduate, the new Bureau tried to enable the student to free himself from the need for extra help. In 1948 the supervisors were incorporated into the approximately eighty-man staff of the Bureau of Study Counsel.

Those with Four A's

The Bureau was founded to cope with what Perry calls "things about studying that a student has learned to take for granted on the basis of twelve years of school, but that no longer held true in college." "The way a student goes about his studying is intimately bound up with his whole system of attitudes and values, his feelings toward himself, toward teachers, parents, and work," he says.

"We became an educational clinic, therefore," Perry continues, "and students consult us on anything from a technique for studying French vocabulary to the more intimate, and perhaps more determining, hopes and apprehensions, values and choice that from the heart of academic life."

About half of the students who visit the Bureau have been sent by their tutor or dean. Most of those who come feel that the Bureau will find a formula which will get them better marks, but Perry is careful to warn that the only valid solution to an individual's problems can come from the individual himself.

The men and women who use the Bureau's services are from all rank lists, though there is naturally a slight preponderance of those who are doing unsatisfactory work. "We've had people who have three A's and a B and want help to get four A's and others who have four A's and don't want to work as hard as they do," says Perry. "Every year we have several men who graduate with magnas."

The Bureau rejects the trend followed in other colleges where so-called "guidance specialists" handle counselling work. Perry feels that experienced faculty members are best fitted to confer with students and help them find solutions to their problems.

"In the face of a burgeoning professionalism in the national movement toward more and more 'guidance,' Harvard prefers a faith in the wisdom of the regular Faculty for counseling work, Perry explains, "We think that a Faculty of outstanding men can overcome the limitations of time load and scholarly concentration and do a better job of human guidance than would a growing bureaucracy of specialists."

Bureau counseling is free, but an hour of tutoring costs three dollars. People who use either of the services usually require between three and five hours of consultation.

To Improve Reading

General student problems come to the attention of the Administration through an informal fall seminar in which tutors, advisors, and instructors in the General Education program discuss the complexities of advising. Using the method of case discussions, Perry tries to make the twenty or thirty Faculty members in the course "more perceptive and more aware of the related circumstances in a student's concern."

Besides its counseling and tutoring work, the Bureau conducts refresher classes in basic mathematics as a prerequisite for Physics I. Last fall 100 people took this course.

Perhaps the most unusual and best-known activity of the Bureau is its semi-annual reading course. Last fall two sections, meeting at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., attracted 300 men and women. Freshmen who showed deficiencies in speed or comprehension on their placement tests made up most of the class, but every spring the course draws a large number of people from the College, graduate schools, and even from the Faculty seeking to improve their reading.

Phrases on Film

The instructors in the course, Perry and Edward T. Wilcox, assistant director of the Bureau and former assistant dean of Freshmen, feel that people's assumptions about the way reading must be done play a large part in their efficiency--or lack of it--as readers. Much emphasis, therefore, is placed on questioning and evaluating these common ideas.

For example, people sometimes think that they must read everything on a page word-by-word to extract the sense, but this is sometimes an unnecessary waste and may lead to no real grasp of what the eye has covered, Wilcox explains.

The most interesting visual devices used in the class are the movies which reproduce a printed page. The words, however, appear on the screen phrase-by-phrase so that it is impossible to look back on what has been read. By increasing the speed of the projector, the instructor forces the student to read faster and widen his eye span.

Approaches Toward Study

Finally, the reading course tries to help students discriminate between the kind of passage they should read word by word with frequent "retrogression" and the kind they can best approach by a "sampling process." The instructors also suggest ways of organizing exam answers and approaches toward studying.

The Bureau's reading course does not count for credit and costs $15. After approximately 15 class meetings, the average student rises from the lower quarter of his class to the upper quarter in performance on reading tests. Perry and Wilcox caution, however, that the skimming methods taught in the course are best suited only to general expository material.

The policy decisions of the Bureau are made by a Faculty Committee on Study Counsel headed by Dean Leighton. The committee, representing a broad base of educational experience, is composed of the Dean of Freshmen, men from the Social Relations and science faculties, and the heads of the General Education program and the Office of Tests.

Remedial Trouble-Shooting

Through Dean Bundy, the committee, in addition to shaping the programs of the Bureau, forms a liaison with the Faculty. According to Perry, this structure enables the Bureau "to act as an additional source through which the Faculty may explore the nature of the learning process from the student's point of view."

Perry feels that the Bureau of Study Counsel is fulfilling its intended function, "to provide a consultive service for students to assist them in breaking out of repetitive, circular thinking about their work and to obtain a sense of independence and mastery in it."

"Although every instructor must consider his students' problems in the learning of his subject, there seems to be a need for an office which makes general observation and thinking about study problems a full-time job." Perry says, "We believe that work which starts as remedial trouble-shooting can be an integral and productive part of education itself."WILLIAM G. PERRY, JR, '35, Director of the Bureau feels that the individual student must solve his own work problems.