Despite student opposition and the reservations of many department chairmen, the Administration's plan for aid to graduate students became official policy this week.

The student aid plan in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences -- known as the Kraus plan after Richard A. Kraus, financial assistant to the dean of the GSAS -- will require departments to supply need-based stipends to all graduate students "within stated limits."

Student members of the Commission on Graduate Education, a student-Faculty body which tentatively rejected the plan in January, objected this week to the plan's allowance for departments to fund students as much as $1000 below their calculated need.

The students also maintained that the plan continues the policy of emphasizing merit over need in the awarding of aid.

At Monday's meeting of the Committee on Fellowships and Other Aid, the Faculty body that passed the official aid plan, several department chairmen raised precisely the opposite objection. They claimed that the requirement for need-based funding is too strict and will interfere with their autonomy to recruit students according to merit.

Despite the disagreements with the plan, the Committee on Fellowships was "willing to take it on a trial basis and see how it works," Lawrence Bogorad, chairman of the Committee, said Monday. "Everyone is a little unhappy with it, but we agreed that this was the best way to spend the available money at this time."