EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON:- The rule of the faculty that precludes a student from obtaining a degree with distinction, who has at any time in his course received a D, is a law both unjust and impolitic. Its injustice lies in the fact that a man may have striven sincerely for three years to graduate with a cum laude and then perchance failed on some knotty half course through a natural inability to cope with his subject. Some men's minds are so constituted that they find it all but impossible to grasp certain lines of study, and after long and laborious work at some difficult course they find a man who is their inferior in some other branch of work, far ahead of them in marks. The rule is impolitic, as it is a standing invitation to take only such courses as one feel he is reasonably sure of a good grade in. A man who has received high marks for two or three years hardly cares to court a D by taking a subject that he realizes he may get that mark on,- no matter though the course be both desirable and beneficial. The rule stands as a temptation to take snap courses and as a beacon light to earn men from instructors who have the reputation of being hard markers, although these self same instructors may be among the most desirable men to be under, in the college. Moreover it kills the ambition which a lower classman may have, for a D once received in the freshman year, all hope of future distinction must be abandoned and a great incentive to work is hereby removed.

Would it not be eminently fairer and wiser for the faculty to so amend the rule as to make the bestowal of a cum laude dependent upon a certain fixed proportion of A's and B's throughout a student's course and leave the question of D's entirely aside? '90.