The exceptional professor may require the student to discuss this sort of statement:

American culture in the fi,fties has at last achieved unity. The break between mass culture and high culture that occurred around the turn of the century, culminated in the cold war of the twenties between the intellectuals and the rest of society. Now that war has been healed by the international crisis, which has placed us all in the same sinking boat, by the spread of liberal education, and by the comforting new ministrations of religion and political philosophy. Today, out of many, we are one. This reunion may have enriched the common stock, but it has also certainly eliminated the cream.

This question takes a stand, and, if perceptively graded, will force the student to do some thinking about two months of a course. With lenient grades, he might get by without saying anything, but that cannot be blamed on the question.

Much more typical is the question that asks for a discussion of a small part of a course, covered by a lecture or two and perhaps a chapter in the reading. These demand no more than memory, even for the strictest grader, although the student who had thought about the problem or done some extra work might get an A or even an A+ on a rare exam.

Rationalizing Sloth

The fact-memory exam has one justification--that grades are intended only to show how much has been learned, and that consequently the examination itself need not be a learning experience. This argument rationalizes sloth in writing an exam, but even at its best it has gross defects. The most serious is that it presupposes accuracy of grading. Examinations with meaningless grades still have a point if the test itself teaches; if the exam is only a measuring rod, then it stands or falls with its accuracy.

The pretense of accuracy can be challenged on a wide front. The best witness against it is the student who knows that his B+ in one course represents less understanding than his classmate's C+ or his own C in another course. Even teachers and administrators doubt how well grades do measure, and begin to question exactly what they measure too.

A traditional complaint against grades--their psychological effect of continual measuring--is noted here but hardly becomes an important argument. Some personalities are certainly injured here when grades become ends in themselves, and the Psychiatric Service offers disturbing reports of insecure students stealing notes and telephoning top students early in the morning to lower their efficiency for that day's exam.

Freshmen suffer this most, says Wallace MacDonald '44, director of freshman scholarships. Adjustment to college is made more difficult, he says, by a feeling of frustration if the student cannot get good enough grades to please the host of outside observers pressuring him. University Hall asks for grades in freshman courses four times a year, and this intensifies the problem. Grades here may serve, asserts Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth, director of University Heath Service, to "reactivate old conflicts" by emphasizing competition.

But competition is really insignificant among the objections to grades at this time. Most would still agree with President Lowell's belief that competition stimulates better academic work. Lowell wrote in the June, 1909, Atlantic Monthly:

A young man wants to test himself on every side, in strength, in quickness, in skill, in courage, in endurance, and he will go through much to prove his merit. He wants to test himself provided he has faith the test is true, and that the quality tried is one that leads to manliness; otherwise he will have none of it. Now, we have not convinced him that high scholarship is a manly thing worthy of his devotion, or that our examinations are faithful tests of intellectual power.

This belief was one of the primary factors in Lowell's advocacy of fields of concentration to replace free electives, and there appears to be no specific disaffection with competition now. When grades present individual psychological problems, the College will offer advice, and psychiatric help if necessary, but it will scarcely discard an entire educational framework to solve problems it considers essentially personal. Any change must come because teachers, and even students, feel that more will be learned without grades, but not because of current psychiatric evidence.

The student's discontent with the system, except for imprecision, is difficult to judge. He has no Committee on Educational Policy to express his grievances, and while the subject might possibly be treated in a Student Council report, it is probably too broad and involved for that group to handle.

Vocal Damnation

One of the few vocal expressions of dissatisfaction was last June's i.e., a general damnation of Harvard education which suffered because its heat was more apparent than its reason. On grades, i.e. said: