To 4000 prospective freshmen, the Harvard admissions office is in some nebulous place called Cambridge 38, Massachusetts, where a specially selected group of malevolent men meet with the express intent of turning down applications.

In addition to this misguided view of the office itself, many other factors help to create the aura of mystery which surrounds the entire admissions system of the College.

A prospective freshman can never be certain about what factors were involved in his ultimate acceptance or rejection, how large a part his interview played, or whether his letter of reference needed to come from the president of United States Steel.

Actually, there is little mystery involved in the admissions system, a system called the "most efficient in the country" by a member of the College Entrance Examination Board. This efficiency may be attributed to the efficiency with which each separate step in the entire process is carried out.

Secretaries Handle Preliminaries

Secretaries handle all the preliminary work done on an application before it is sent to a member of the Committee on Admissions for judgement. This preliminary work consists of checking the application to see whether it had been filled out completely and properly and whether the applicant plans to take the proper college boards.

If the application is complete, the secretaries code all its information in the margin. For instance, if the applicant is unmarried, they might put a number one in the margin; if married, a two. Other relevant material is coded in a similar manner, and the application is sent to the General Service Office in the basement of University Hall, where these numbers are fed into an always disinterested, but never inaccurate IBM machine. It quickly belches forth a white card containing all the information which the applicant had so pain-stakingly provided.

Its purpose is to case the job of sorting the applications. To divide them into different categories, by states for instance, entails feeding the cards back through the machine. It does the job quickly and efficiently.

The application, placed in a folder along with the preparatory school's report, correspondence, and the interviewer's report, will eventually be read by a member of the admissions board.

To unify the grading standards for each area, one board member reads the applications from that section of the country. Since he is familiar with the type of school and educational standards of that section, he is able to judge all the candidates on an equitable basis.

Eight Factors

As the board member reads an application, he judges the applicant on eight factors and rates him from one to six in each.

The first factor is a preliminary guess about the applicant's academic ability, which the judge makes after reviewing his preparatory school record.

An applicant who receives a rank of one is considered certain of attaining group one. If he is a probable honors candidate, he is rated two, and if only a possible honors candidate, he is given a three rating. A four rating is given to a candidate who, in the opinion of the judge, will obtain passing, but not honor grades, and the number five candidate is questionable. There is no hope for number six.

The candidate's record in extracurricular activities is the second factor taken into consideration. Again he is rated from one to six, according to the extent of his participation.