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Curriculum Flexibility and Experimentation: Restructuring the University-Part II

Recognizing the demands made on the time of admissions officers and employers, we would not encourage a deluge of written material on the Registrar's office. But we would encourage students to include in their official files copies of their two or three best course papers and copies of their senior essays if they wrote them. The senior essay would normally be completed before the end of the third year; and if a student elected to stay part of a fourth year before going to a graduate school, he could forward a copy of his essay as a part of his application.

The fluid nature of the entire portfolio should be emphasized. A student would be allowed to change letter grades to passes any time after receiving the grades. And he would be permitted, indeed encouraged, to defer including samples of his work in the portfolio until he decided what constituted his best efforts. (Unlimited substitutions would wreak havoc on the Registrar's office).

Our recommendations concerning grades are, to us, a substantial first step away from a deliberately competitive academic system toward one in which a student can gain satisfaction simply by coming to understand a subject and achieving some degree of competence in discussing it. Academic competition is like all others: it creates winners and losers. Our educational philosophy is not so egalitarian as to deny all distinctions among students or so idealistic as to deny the necessity of allotting educational resources discriminatively on the basis of demonstrated ability and commitment. But practical distinctions need not be publicly signified by divisive labels. And academic success need not be viewed as a competitive triumph meriting a distinctive trophy. These are serious issues-we see too many students in our schools competing for labels and trophies without being allowed to appreciate learning for its own rewards and joys. Grades contribute to the competitive climate, of course; but if their evaluative and abbreviational merits can be seen by both students and teachers as primary,grades can cease to be instruments to rank students. We have greater respect for the teacher who grades all his students by the same excessive standards than for the teacher who sets a median score and then curves his students' grades accordingly. In the latter case, the student will see himself struggling against his peers rather than matching his ability to the professor's absolute standards.

With the above arguments as a supportive base, we propose the following changes in Harvard's system of evaluation:

the elimination of Rank Lists and Dean's List. The move toward a more ungraded curriculum makes the traditional criteria for ranking students outmoded.

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the dropping of the label "Honors' and the abolition of the three Honors distinctions, cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. Although grades (especially when viewed in personal rather than competitive terms) can provide an incentive for academic work, Honors distinctions are determined at the end of an undergraduate career and are little more than trophies awarded for public display. In our opinion, high quality work in the senior year that is motivated by the chance to secure such a trophy is not to be prized. If a student wants to demonstrate his scholarly ability to his future assessors, his portfolio and letters of recommendation should supply ample evidence.

the elimination of the mediancurve grading policy by individual instructors.

in as many courses as individual professors will allow, but particularly in courses taken for a pass or ungraded credit, the institution of an option where-by students may submit papers and projects JOINTLY for a common grade, with the standards of quality, if not quantity, of work commensurate with the number of student contributors. We want to encourage collaborative academic efforts among students for the excitement and insights they can provide. This curriculum plan is the result of such a collaboration.

We would like to see community-wide debate on the issues raised in this plan. We hope that our ideas will elicit enough student and faculty support to induce the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to implement the plan, or at least its essential features. As Dean May said at the end of September, the Committee on Undergraduate Education "must eventually present a package for the Faculty to vote either up or down." Mindful of the flaws inherent in piecemeal reform, we have offered a package that touches on all the issues that have been debated in curriculum discussions over the past two years. The proposals that concern House courses and changes in the House system itself will have to be dealt with by the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life as well as our own. We encourage students who want to work for the implementation of this plan to run for either of the two committees next term, and we welcome comments from all sources addressed to either of us at Currier House.

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