Wilcox Favors Shift in Course Load

The Committee on Educational Policy has debated and decided against an "informal suggestion" that the college revise its four-course-a-term rate rule.

The suggestion was made in a report on the independent Study program by Edward T. Wilcox, director of advanced standing and the committee's secretary. Wilcox said that many departments have tended to use independent study "to allow students to spend extra time on a thesis, on private preparation for general examinations, on research--in effect, to let students take fewer than four courses."

He suggested that the rate rule be changed "so that free time in the last two years of college becomes a matter of educational policy."

Wilcox proposed that any upper-classman who has taken more than four courses in one term be permitted to take fewer than four in a later term. "But this wasn't in any sense a formal proposal," he said. "If it were going to be adopted, it would have to be accompanied by a lot of other changes."

Critics of the suggestion pointed out several defects, Wilcox said. The change would have to be accompanied by a strict "drop rule" to prevent students from taking eight courses and then dropping all but their best five late in the term.

"You'd have to say that anyone who dropped a course after, say, Nov. 1, would be given an E," Wilcox said. "I'm not sure that undergraduates would appreciate that."

The proposal also "has the defect of making a very flexible, informal program into a more unwieldy universal one," he added.

A department can now exercise its judgment on questions of independent study, agreeing only to the occasional requests it considers reasonable, he explained. If the policy were changed, departments might feel compelled to tell tutors to turn down all requests, rather than accept every plan for reduced course loads.

Wilcox's report showed how the Independent Study program had its origin in the "rate-reduction" system, which allowed students who had taken five courses in a previous term to take fewer than four courses so they could study for general examinations.

In 1958, the title of the program was changed to "independent study for ungraded credit," with the idea that students were no longer being permitted merely to drop a course, but to take advantage of the chance to study with a Faculty member.

"Now the course of independent study seems to have shifted again from study to rate reduction," Wilcox said.