We encourage professors to experiment with different teaching forms. Joint seminars should be offered to students, with professors outside Arts and Sciences involved. The "debate" between Professors Walzer and Nozick in Philosophy 174 is a method that should be more widely attempted. Flexible scheduling of reading periods in courses will also allow more discussion periods with students participating.

Lecturers should be encouraged to print and/or videotape their lectures for the benefit of auditors and students in courses who miss lectures. Recording lectures for a permanent lecture library would be particularly valuable in courses where professors have been teaching for years and are nearing retirement. Such a lecture library would be uniquely precious resource for the University community.

Advising

Each freshman should be affiliated with one of the residential Houses, with the opportunity to change Houses at the end of freshman year. Eventually, we would like to see the Yard converted to several Houses with communal dining facilities in the Union and Lehman and Robinson Halls.. Informal advice from upper-classmen at the dinner table can serve to complement the assistance offered by official advisors.

Seniors should be included in the pool of official advisors for freshmen. Radcliffe's Senior Sister program is a good model. In the period before the Yard dorms are converted to Houses, seniors should comprise about half the proctor-advisors in freshman entries, receiving free room and board for their services.

All departments and professional schools should issue guidelines for undergraduates, informing them of admissions requirements to post-baccalaureate programs and including sample plans of study designed with those graduate programs in mind.

The Committee on Special Studies should issue guidelines and requirements for Special Concentration programs and should offer counseling services through an advisor recruited expressly to guide undergraduates with "special studies" objectives.

Issue an all-University computerized directory of tutorial resources. Faculty member, graduate students, and upperclassmen interested in serving as counselors or Independent Study supervisors should be listed along with their educational backgrounds and some indication of their accessibility.

The services of the Bureau of Study Counsel and the Office of Graduate and Career Plans should be made more explicit to undergraduates through descriptive brochures.

Alumni should be enlisted as professional counselors so that undergraduates can have greater access to people working out there in the "real world." Each House should extend invitations to its alumni or alumnae, asking them to spend a weekend or so in the guest suite and to make themselves available to undergraduates interested in certain careers. Professional research fellows, such as the Nieman, Kennedy Institute, and Junior Fellows, might also be enlisted.

Evaluation

In general, only work done to fulfill concentration and pre-professional requirements will be graded. All work in General Education can be on a pass/fail or ungraded credit basis, with grades optional. With departmental approval, nongraded work may be counted toward concentration requirements. Since most of the freshman year in our three-year scheme would be Gen. Ed-oriented, most courses taken in the first year will be ungraded. Freshman seminars would continue to grant ungraded credit. At present, too much fear over grades is generated among freshmen and makes adjustment to Harvard or Radcliffe unnecessarily difficult.

A student should be allowed to take an unlimited number of ungraded courses in any term.

A student should also be allowed to change ANY course grade of D or better to a pass after receiving the grade, with restrictions imposed only by concentration and pre-professional requirements. Grades are for the student's benefit alone, and any use he may want to give to his transcript in the future is his own business.

We believe that only successes should be recorded permanently; failures should be crased from the transcript upon the satisfactory completion of an additional course. This is not to deny the educational benefits of failure. In fact, our recommendations are designed to encourage students to explore untried areas of study without the fear that unsuccessful efforts will result in permanent stigmas.

With flexible course loads and a reduced course requirement for the A.B. degree, failing grades will be less onerous and costly in terms of time and money. This change in attitude and atmosphere might allow instructors to heighten their expectations of students' academic commitment and make them less likely to award a passing grade to an undeserving student.

THE PERSONAL PORTFOLIO: Each student should be encouraged to put together a personal portfolio or dossier to include his permanent transcript and samples of his best work. The rationale for this proposal is that a student should be judged as a person and not as a collection of grades. If a student decided to apply for a position in a graduate school or a business establishment, he and his assessors would all benefit from a less impersonal presentation his accomplishments.