Administrative Board Asks Ranking Change For Honors and Draft

The Administrative Board yesterday recommended that the College change its method of ranking students for honors degrees and for the Selective Service.

It proposed a new system which would give plus and minus grades much less weight than they have at present.

Pluses and minuses are now ignored for purposes of placing students in the rank groups -- I through VI -- and on Dean's List. The Board yesterday, in effect, said that the College ought to be consistent and virtually ignore them in determining honors and Selective Service standing, too.

The changeover would affect only a small number of the students in Groups II, III, and IV -- perhaps 100 of them -- and no one at the top or bottom of his class, Dean Monro said yesterday.

The College has always assigned individual ranks to students who are candidates for honors. It extended the practice to all students for ten years during and after the Korean War, and did so again last Spring, when local draft boards again began demanding students' standings.

The present system assigns rank the same way Phi Beta Kappa picks out students for possible election. An "A" is worth 12 points, and the scale goes down from there -- 11 points for an A-minus, 10 points for a B-plus, 9 points for a B, etc.

System's Inequities

But as several Faculty members pointed out last Spring, the system is out of joint with the rank groups because it counts pluses and minuses.

The Administrative Board suggested it be scrapped for a 19-point system -- one of several drafted by Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Tests. Under the new system, an A would be worth 19 points and an A-minus 18 points, but then the scale would jump to 15 points for a B-plus 14 for a B, 13 for a B-minus, then down to 10 for a C-plus, etc.

Such a change would have almost no effect on honors, since summas are given only to students with the highest grades, and magnas and cum laudes are awarded more on the basis of theses and generals than on grades. It would, however, move at least 50 students from Groups II and III up on the draft rank list and an equal number from Group IV down.

But, even more important, the Administrative Board's proposal is an implicit defense of the present rank group system. The rank grouping has been under attack by professors who feel that too many students are making Groups I, II and III. They have urged that the minimum requirements for these groups be raised.

By recommending that the rank groups remain as they are, and that the rank lists for honors and Selective Service be made to correspond with them more closely, the Board -- which includes all the senior tutors and several deans -- showed that it did not agree.

The Committee on Educational Policy will discuss the Board's proposal today, and then will prepare its own report for a full Faculty meeting. The Faculty, however, may not take up the issue until sometime this Spring, Dean Monro said