A Grade for Tutorial

The faculty's current examination of the tutorial system is certainly a commendable task. But it is discouraging to discover that they are giving favorable consideration to making non-honors tutorial a compulsory, graded fourth course. They have found the non-honors tutorials deficient and believe that the only cure is to wave a mystical gradesheet over non-honors tutees, and all will be well.

Such a proposal, if accepted, would be a serious setback to the tutorial system and a sad commentary on the quality of Harvard teaching. Whatever success tutorial enjoys at present is due to the quality and relevance of the material studied and the knowledge and teaching skill of the tutor. Instituting graded tutorial would be an admission that the present supply of these assets is inadequate to produce the interest needed for a good tutorial session. Grades would indeed create a certain type of interest. But better instruction and teaching would create another, more desirable sort of interest. If departments simply impose grades on presently unsatisfactory tutorial programs, they will scarcely succeed in making tutorial important to the student or a valuable learning experience, though he may in time learn to do whatever it will take to get a B minus for satisfactory conversation on the philosophy of history. This grade would then be entered, given equal weight with his mark for Renaissance history or Soviet government.

Tutorial has always been considered a part of the curriculum which gained its impetus from the students' own interests. Before the faculty draws the conclusion that it is the students who are the cause of a weak tutorial, it would have to claim that the tutors and their teaching techniques are above improvement; something which they could not possibly claim at present. In some departments tutors merely follow a pre-ordained program which holds no more interest for them than for their students. Many departments assign tutors to teach a field about which they have little knowledge and less interest. Such men, forced to teach in an area they do not like and required to adhere to a curriculum they did not desire, can hardly be expected to stimulate their students toward greater achievement.

Tutorial succeeds best when it involves only one student and one tutor. Then the motivation is not the grade, but the desire to prove one's thoughts to a man one respects. To be caught up unprepared in an individual tutorial makes one feel like a fool, and avoiding this is a greater motivation than the possibility of an honors grade at the end of the term.

But there is not enough money available for any considerable expansion of individual tutorial, although advances could be made if the departments expressed more interest. So tutors must do as best they can with group tutorials, which are little better than small sections. The only grade which could be derived from group tutorial would be vague, and based on peripheral factors--intelligence of expression and conversational gamesmanship. While such a grade might produce some work it would also bore or even outrage the intelligent student.

The College is burdened with enough grades as it is. Improvement of tutorial will come only from more subtle measures, which will improve student and tutor interest: careful planning of each tutorial, use of tutors only within their fields of interest, and a softening of the more confining departmental requirements for tutorial curricula. Only when the student wants to work because of the intrinsic interest of the material and the enthusiasm of the tutor will tutorial produce real education.