Pass-Fail Struggles Into Life

Pass-fail is one of those catchy little phrases that is no longer catchy. It has been almost two years since student agitation for an ungraded course began and the intricate deliberations on the question since have made pass-fail a commonplace at Harvard before it is a reality.

The Faculty fooled Dean Ford this Tuesday by halting its debate after an hour and approving a plan which will allow all students here to take a quarter of their college courses ungraded. The approval wasn't surprising, but its briskness was. The Dean's eventual adoption has been insured since it was approved in principle a month ago by the Committee on Educational Policy, but Ford thought the Faculty would want a longer debate before passing it.

The real surprise though came earlier, when the pass-fail plan got the CEP's blessing in November. "We've acted so long on the assumption that it wouldn't be approved that we hardly know what to think or do, now that pass-fail is here," Henry R. Norr '68, president of the Harvard Policy Committee said recently. Norr and other veteran pass-fail warriors had been led to believe that the Faculty and its CEP were hostile to the fourth course idea and they have a hard time explaining just what went right this fall.

The CEP was undoubtedly swayed by the single strongest argument for pass-fail which has been constantly repeated during the two-year debate. David Riesman '31, Henry Ford II Professor of Social Science, states it best: "Most students here take too many courses. They chop their emotional energies into too many little bits. We should be encouraging students to play from weakness instead of strength, but the system here puts pressure on the student not to extend himself in areas where he's awkward because he fears not doing brilliantly."

In addition, there were some new twists to the case for pass-fail this year. Cynics would argue that Harvard was nudged into action by Yale's new pass-fail and the publicity that surounded it. The CEP vote to approve pass-fail in principle came less than a week after the Yale Faculty switched that college's grading to four categories: fail, pass, high pass, and honors.

It is more likely that the pass-fail plan won approval because Faculty think it is what students want. The HPC, by concentrating on this one question, won over a Faculty that could have gone either way. An indifferent Faculty member who could not think of a good reason for rejecting the plan was willing to try the experiment.

The chief engineer of this modest student power coup is Norr, who has worked on pass-fail through every phase of its tangled history. He was a member of the 1966-67 HPC which hit upon the idea one spring afternoon of combining its desire for a free fifth course and pass-fail into one package proposal to the CEP.

The fifth course pass-fail plan never appealed to Norr or Riesman, then one of the three Faculty HPC members. They argued that it was little more than a dressed up form of auditing and would put psychological pressure on students to increase their course load to five. Norr toyed with the idea of filing a minority report to the CEP. But the HPC traditionally hammers out its differences in closed meetings and then presents a united front when it arrives at a recommendation. So Norr decided to give no hint of the HPC's internal dissension.

When Norr became HPC president in February he faced a dilemma. The fifth-course pass-fail plan was only a hair further away from adoption than the fourth-course one is now--it had been approved by the CEP and was scheduled for the next Faculty meeting. But Norr still didn't like it and now he had a chance to kill it. The new HPC members agreed with his position and they voted to repudiate their predecessors' proposal

The move looked like a debacle. The CEP withdrew its recommendation from the Faculty docket and the HPC's prestige plummeted. Old members argued that the new HPC had thrown away, for the sake of principle, the best change students could practically hope for. The new members didn't get their own pass-fail recommendation ready until mid-April, too late to try to bring them to a vote at the Faculty's May meeting.

Norr had little reason to be cheerful about the HPC's prospects as the new year began. He was worried by the departure of Dean of the College John U. Monro '34, who had nursed the fifth course pass-fail to CEP approval and shuttled information back and forth between the Administration and the HPC. Without Monro, it seemed the HPC might go the way of the Harvard Council on Undergraduate Affairs, the abortive student government the HPC and HUC succeeded.

Dean Glimp has attended HPC meetings far less faithfully than his predecessor. For six long weeks this fall there was no action on pass-fail, and it seemed to Norr that the lines of communication with University Hall had broken down.

But thrown on its own devices, the HPC was able to convince the Faculty that the fourth-course pass-fail idea is workable. The HPC turned to what Norr calls "a lot of politics" -- a letter to Dean Ford, conferences with CEP secretary Edward T. Wilcox, and visits to individual CEP members.

The afternoon of the Dow demonstration Norr and another HPC member became the first students within memory to testify before the CEP. Norr made the usual plea for allowing broader experimentation, but his other argument may have been decisive.

Norr told the CEP that pass-fail would allow students "a different kind of educational experience within the courses they took." Without grades they would be freed from "pressure to regurgitate the official line," and a few might use the three hours on a final exam to tell the instructor what they really think.

For whatever reasons, the CEP voted to approve pass-fail in principle two weeks after Norr's testimony.

Letting students take one of their four courses without grades has turned out not to be as simple as it sounds. Some of the many difficulties spotted in the last month and a half are trivial: Honors seniors don't have to take finals if they get an honor grade on spring hour exams. Should a "pass" on an hour exam exempt a senior from the final?

Other problems are more substantial and are still unresolved. The Faculty decided not to try to stiffen the Harvard definition of "pass" for purposes of pass-fail, but individuals may still be able to impose a stricter definition on their own courses.

Under the CEP legislation, an instructor has the right to bar pass-fail from his course. Few are likely to be so blunt. "It would be churlish of an instructor to say 'take me 100 per cent or not at all,'" Riesman comments; "I think most can be chided out of such totalism."

But already Faculty members are talking about setting quotas on the number of pass-fail students they will admit next fall, and it will be psychologically difficult for an instructor to turn away students who want to take his course for a grade and give the places to pass-fail students.

Individual departments will decide whether concentrators under their jurisdiction will be able to count pass-fail courses toward degree requirements. Neither Princeton nor Brown allows students to use pass-fail this way, and there is little reason to believe that Harvard departments will give students free rein. Science departments with sequential courses will probably be especially reluctant to let students use pass-fail within their field. And almost every department is likely to require that its basic course be taken with a grade by concentrators.

Perhaps the most intriguing administrative question is what relation pass-fail will have to General Education. Princeton allows pass-fail to be used for distribution requirements; Brown does not, but neither has an elaborately structured Gen Ed program like Harvard's. Wilcox wants a rule that will let students take only one of4EDWARD T. WILCOX Three-Course Pressure