THOUGH their sophistication put them in the top ten on Playboy's loose list last Fall, Radcliffe girls don't always measure up to the image they seem to flaunt in classrooms every day.

Go to dinner there sometimes. Listen to the late night conversations in the dorms. Listen to the early afternoon conversations on the Radcliffe Quad. Meet a Cliffie. Find out.

Away of somewhere beyond the Cambridge Common, Cliffies are hung up above love, sex, and all those normal things that Cliffies aren't supposed to get caught on. Will that goodnight kiss wind up in a late night wrestling match? Should you really sleep with him? Where do you get those pills?

Sometimes the answers are found in late night talks, sometimes the girls trot off to see Dr. Graham--the Radcliffe sex man. Every year around the beginning of October, little signs start appearing around the Cliffie announcing the yearly arrival of Leroy Graham, counselor on love, sex, and other related topics.

Graham, who is an assistant professor of Sociology at American University and has taught at several other colleges, spends regular three-day weekends at Radcliffe once a month. Dividing his time between individual appointments, group sessions, and informal chats over coffee in the dining hall. Graham knows the Radcliffe reputation, but he's seen it from a perspective about half of a mile closer than the Harvard boys.

"There's a feeling that there's more sexual freedom here at Radcliffe, but I'm not sure that's true," he admits. The most open discussion he's ever had on sex with a group of girls took place in South Carolina--at Columbia College with a 600 all-girl student body.

The nitty gritty discussions at Radcliffe are rare, and often rather amusing. Usually 15 or 20 freshman attend. When Graham explains that they can either ask questions directly or write them down on cards, they invariably choose to write them out--in his three years at Radcliffe, only three groups have voted for open questions.

Although the written questions are usually open and frank (typical questions run the range of "What can you do besides take cold showers when you're frustrated?" to inquiries on frigidity, birth control, and abortion), the discussion end of these group sessions often look like prayer meetings. Girls sit quietly for two hours, several always furiously concentrating on their knitting, others equally interested in the floor. When Graham asks questions--as he persists in doing--they hang silently around the room. Occasionally someone will whisper a reluctant answer.

BECAUSE the different groups often ask the same questions, Graham arranges his answers into the four basic sex questions: premarital intercourse, birth control, love, and "necking and petting." Something these are interspersed with the more specific problems--sexual differences in couples, frigidity, abortion, mate selection. But almost everything ends up in the abstract--Graham quotes frequently from Kinsey and Masters and Johnson.

The longer a woman has attended school and college, the more likely she is to lose her virginity before marriage. "Why do you think that is?" asks Graham to the Knitters and floor starers. Silence. "Well, maybe because they don't get married right after high school, so they have more time," one girl mumbles.

Most of the girls are waiting for their own questions to be answered. Graham prefers to meet with a group at least twice, and there are invariably fewer girls the second time.

He makes a point of explaining different methods of contraception in great detail. Graham is not a doctor himself, but took some medical courses for his Ph.D. In individual appointments, he says, "I do talk with them about the pros and cons of birth control and make medical referral where advisable. I feel any girl who wants contraceptives should have them."

One Boston gynecologist he recommended was so swamped by calls from freshmen in one dorm asking for appointments that his secretary would guess the girls' addresses before they gave it.

THIS YEAR is Graham's last at Radcliffe. Mrs. Genevieve Austin, dean of Residence, who is in charge of arrangements for Graham's coming here, says that the college is looking for a counselor next year who lives close by and will be more available.

Graham teaches a course on Marriage and Family at American University. He received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Marriage Counseling from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. "It took forever to get it," he says. His thesis was on premarital chastity as viewed by two modern Protestant theologians and Kinsey and Margaret Mead. "I wanted to see how relevant theology was to actual facts," he says.