Keep Summas Steady

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences will vote next week on a proposal to count elective courses in the decision to award Summa Cum Laude degrees while decreasing the number of Summa recipients to between four and five percent of the total degree candidates. We are concerned that the proposal's recommendations are too vague and we hope that the Faculty will be stringent in the requirements according to which it ultimately makes these decisions. More importantly, though, we encourage the Faculty to not reduce the percentage of Summa recipients for the sake of numbers alone; instead, we hope that the Faculty will define clear qualifications for receiving Summa and will award as many students as are worthy.

The proposal suggests that candidates for Summa degrees demonstrate "outstanding performance across the various components of non-concentration requirements ... in each of the board curricular areas." As Frank B. Baaird Jr. Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, chair of the physics department, expressed, the language of the proposal is quite ambiguous. "I'm not sure," he explained, "[that] the Faculty knows what a 'good use of electives' would be." We encourage the Faculty to be precise in the particulars of the decision and to disseminate the new requirements to all students.

By expanding the requirements of Summa to the grades a student receives in electives, the administration effectively pushes students to take electives only in topics they find easy. Moreover, if distribution requirements within electives are enforced for Summa nomination, the students who are genuinely intrigued by their field of concentration and wish to pursue it further would be punished. Therefore, at its core, the system of taking electives into account in calculating Summa is flawed.

We are also concerned about the desire to decrease the number of Summa degrees. The requirement that the overall number of Summas each year be between four and five percent of the total degree candidates (down from this past year's rate of seven percent) sacrifices personal achievement and individual accomplishment for the sake of some arbitrary cut-off. As such, we strongly discourage the Faculty from voting affirmatively on this element of the proposal. Give closer scrutiny to Summa candidates, but stick to your own guidelines; candidates thought worthy of highest honors should not be excluded from the distinction of Summa just because a large number of their classmates are also deserving.