Clemency

THE History Department, often berated for inflexibility and insensitivity to undergraduate interests, reversed its image this week by bravely abandoning junior generals. It was only last year that the Department voted to create the exams and the easy course would have been to use this years juniors as guinea pigs to measure the tests' effectiveness. But the department recognized that its experiment, heavily attacked in an HPC audit this fall, was not working and was willing the admit the exams were a mistake.

The justification for junior generals was always mysterious--they seemed at best a mechanical device for cutting down the number of seniors writing theses. The exams could have weakened junior tutorial, but with rumors of their impending abolition in the air, they probably did little harm this year as most tutors ignored them.

The Department has returned to a more flexible system, which allows even a Group IV student with a recommendation from his tutor to write a thesis. At the same time the department's new senior conference courses promise to become the acceptable alternative the HPC requested for seniors who don't want to write theses. Hopefully the department will give the same serious attention to other HPC recommendations--altering the form of the senior thesis, changing sophomore tutorial to a half course for credit, and eliminating or deemphasizing senior generals.