Operation Abolition: II

The Administration has grown fond of the Sophomore Standing program, so fond that University Hall is likely to greet with great reserve any action to abolish it. The Student Council Committee that actually did recommend abolition realized well enough that the apparently more valuable and certainly more expedient course would have been to cry for improvement of the program's weaknesses.

To be sure, attacking the weaknesses is strikingly light exercise. It takes very little effort, for instance, to single out Advanced Placement tests as Sophomore Standing's most conspicuous failing. They are too simple, and they show not at all whether an entering Freshman is ready to assume the name and concentration requirements of a Sophomore. Graded on a scale of one-through-five, they force the College to pick 100 Sophomores a year on the hopelessly inadequate basis of little numbers, the kind of criteria Harvard usually prefers to distrust.

Improve the tests, then--it seems a delightfully sound solution. Yet it solves nearly nothing. The concentration, distribution and House systems of Harvard's undergraduate education are carefully structured to last four years. No conceivable test can gauge whether a student is actually capable of handling it in three, and the college curiously denies the worth of its own structure by offering him the choice. The choice, despite the singularly unpersuasive fact that 80 per cent of polled A.P. students seem to be happy with it, should really never be presented at all.

For the three-year alternative is a false one: it will become no less so for all the refinements and efficiencies that the Administration may graft upon it. It makes no significant difference if University Hall devises better tests: the program will continue, while pretending to climinate the Freshman year, simply to meddle with the Sophomore year, and in effect to foul up both.

So recommendations that Sophomore Standing be improved are politic indeed, but improvement is too easy a way to make the program seem less distasteful than so many Faculty evidently think it. The experiment has been tried; it is time that discussion of it be carried from the confines of the office of Advanced Standing. The Faculty ought at last to have its chance to see it brought up as a separate item on its docket, and to consider ending it.