The Summer School cancelled a slightly higher number of courses than in past years, leaving about 50 students without their course selection, Director Marshall Pihl '55 said this week.

Illness and low course enrollment caused six instructors to cancel seven courses, Pihl said. Usually about four courses are cancelled for the summer but Pihl did not attribute the higher number to any particular trend.

"Students who pre-registered were notified by first class mail that the courses were cancelled," to avoid any problems when they came to Cambridge, Pihl said.

The courses that were cancelled, Pihl said, included Comp Lit 170, "Gertrude Stein;" Drama S-70, "Theater of the Avant Garde;" Government 1340, "Constitutional Interpretation;" Government 1595, "American Political Theory;" Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations S-199, "History of the Jews in Europe to the End of the 18th Century;" French S-P; and German S-170, "Golden Age of the German Film."

"We never cancel courses," Pihl said, but he added "we have got to accede to requests by instructors' who no longer want to teach a course they have already agreed to run."

Pihl said the long lines at registration last week were due not to course cancellations, but resulted from a computer slowdown.

"We were prepared to go fast with our computers," Pihl said. But because almost all the English as a Second Language students registered at the same time, the computers could not respond to information requests as quickly as usual. He said there will be a new system to solve that problem for next year.

Another change which hit the Summer School this year is the addition of Economics Department placement tests. Pihl said the tests are designed to weed students without any quantitative background from upperlevel economic courses.

Students took these tests during the past week and those who do not pass them must take a parallel methods course at night along with their chosen economics course. Pihl said close to half of the economics courses have been affected by the placement tests.

Such proficiency tests are not likely to expand too far into other departments, Pihl said. "If we erect too many barriers it contradicts our mission. We don't want to close people out."