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Exiled Tutoring Schools Once Fought College For Control of Educating Students, but Lost

At Their Peak in '30's, Cram Schools Stole, Cheated to Get Exam Questions

Tries Revival

But in 1948, behind a front called Cramer Research, Inc., located in a Boston office-building, Cramer attempted to repeat his Harvard Square success. He sent a letter to several final clubs at the College, stating that he was ready "to provide tutoring for hour, mid-year, and general examinations in the major liberal arts studies."

A CRIMSON editor, in response to this letter, began to take tutoring under Cramer along with hundreds of other Harvard students. His cancelled check was sufficient proof, and on January 15, 1948, the CRIMSON announced: "After taking an 8-year knockout count, Harvard's biggest bugaboo in recent years, the professional tutoring school, has begun its climb from the canvas."

Dean Bender responded to the article by branding the cram parlor as "a menace to decent education," and Cramer stopped his activities as an "instructor" for the second time.

Now Cramer is back in Cambridge, as Lester S. Cramer IL. The Law School Admissions Board, he said, accepted him with "full knowledge of my background."

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The problem of the tutoring schools however, was not limited to Harvard. The American Mercury said that they "spread like cancerous tissue over American colleges." In the "subsidizing South, cram schools are required to maintain mastodonic football teams." Burton claimed that schools operated at Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Chicago University, several of the Big Ten schools, Stanford, U.S.C., and others.

But Time Magazine noted in 1936 that, "Although tutoring bureaus appear . . . on most sizable U.S. campuses, they are actually characteristic only of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, where studentsM-6LESTER CRAMER '30, now a first-year law student at Harvard, once head man of a noted tutoring school, attempted a post-war revival.

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