Seminar Study Group Distributes 1485 Polls

A comprehensive questionnaire on the freshman seminar program is being sent to 1485 students in the College this week, as a special Faculty committee to study the seminars begins a major reevaluation of the four-year-old program.

Only about half the forms have been sent to actual seminar participants. According to committee chairman John J. Conway, Master of Leverett House, the rest of the 1485 were chosen by "quite careful if inscrutable methods" as a source of information about students not in seminars.

Three Criteria Used

Byron Stookey, Jr., associate director of Advanced Standing, prepared the questionnaire and selected the non-seminar participants. Stookey said yesterday that three selection criteria were used: the field of concentration originally indicated by the student, his predicted rank list, and whether he attended a public or private school.

Every seminar participant will be matched with someone in his class who resembles him in these three characteristics but did not enroll in a seminar.

The questionnaire asks for detailed information on several aspects of a student's academic and extra-curricular career at Harvard. Seminar participants are given several specific questions about their seminar; the other students are asked why they did not apply to a freshman seminar.

The "objective" form of the poll will allow the seminar study committee to feed the answers into IBM machines and codify the results. But members of the Faculty group will also meet and talk with a few very small groups of former seminar participants in order to get a more comprehensive analysis of the program.

Will Report To CEP

Conway said yesterday that his committee will report to the Faculty Committee on Educational Policy at its December meeting. The report will evaluate "the worth of the seminar program as a part of undergraduate education."

The final recommendations of the committee will probably have "a great effect" on the future of freshman seminars, Conway said.

The questionnaire makes a special attempt to obtain information about seminars in the natural sciences. Conway stressed that "non-specialist science is a problem in college education which continues to require particular examination."