Operation Abolition

After months of deliberation and haggling, the Student Council Committee on Educational Policy has come up with a sensible, but probably quixotic, proposal: Abolish Sophomore Standing.

The Committee's reasons for its stand are, for the most part, valid. It observed that a new sophomore has many opportunities not offered to a normal incoming freshman. For instance, he can get waiver of the Gen Ed A requirement, exemption from lower-level Gen Ed courses and from Physical Training, immediate assignment to a House, and concentration in the first year of residence. But, the SCCEP report charges with complete accuracy, "the Advanced Placement tests, the present criteria for Sophomore Standing, do not measure quantities relevant to these privileges."

Furthermore, the report points out, these exemptions are frequently an important factor in the decision to try for or to accept Sophomore Standing. And Sophomore Standing does represent an "intellectual merit badge," both for the student and for the secondary school that produced him.

It is also true, as the report points out, that "Harvard is a four-year college." The report contends that, instead of trying to iron out the difficulties in the freshman year, the College has merely eliminated it--along with several meaningful and valuable experiences. Statements from Masters, Senior Tutors, and Departmental tutors convinced the Committee that "Sophomore Standing Students have been hurt by acceleration, even though the students themselves do not feel the damage."

This last remark from the report points up its major difficulty, one that may well keep it from gaining all the credence it should in official circles. Almost freakishly short, the report neglects to mention that nearly 80 per cent of Soph Standing students polled earlier this year favored retention of the program. Its conclusions are certainly not supported by the poll, and the report makes little attempt to justify this. Thus, while it seems logical that everyone should live in the Yard, experience Physical Training, and spend a year before deciding what to concentrate in, the fact that an overwhelming majority of students feel well-adjusted in the program certainly leaves room for argument.

The report insists that, once a student commits himself to a three-year stay at Harvard, he is caught. This does not seem to be the case. A switch to a four-year program does not have to come within hours of Commencement, as the Committee seems to have assumed, and is not necessarily a major trauma. It should be noted, however, that a student who changes courses in mid-stream will still miss certain elements of a normal four-year residence.

The SCCEP might well have trained its guns on the real weak spot of the program--the Advanced Placement tests. Opinion is almost unanimous that these examinations, taken in the spring of senior year in high school, are ridiculously easy. While of course they cannot show a student's emotional preparedness or his ability to adjust to House life, these tests in many cases do not even measure academic competence effectively. Much of the scholastic difficulties that Sophomore Standing students encounter--and apparently these are what the Committee was largely concerned with--might disappear if the Advanced Placement tests were more adequate to their task.

In its majority report, the Committee abandoned any effort to improve the Soph Standing program for an all-put drive to have it abolished. The Committee's familiarity with the Administration should have warned that this was not the best path to effective action. And the Committee's minority report will certainly not increase the impact of the majority statement. If the Committee really wanted to help matters, it probably should have concentrated on reforms that might be enacted, instead of dividing its strength so that part of the Committee (unfortunately the majority) could go off on a chase of the wild goods.