Deacon said that the course requirements and level of difficulty have remained stable since the inception of the class, although he noted that last year the weekly sections were lengthened from one-and-a-half to two hours.

"I think its reputation as a gut is a double-edged sword," Deacon said. "It creates a lot of confusion for people from the humanities who come in and realize that they're actually going to have to do science."

Students who took the class last year agree that the course requirements were beyond what they had originally anticipated.

"I didn't give the class that much time because I thought it would be easy," says John C. Donahue '93. "The midterm and final were much, much harder than the weekly quizzes would lead you to believe."

But as with many supposed Harvard guts, the myth of easy "Sex" persists. Hundreds of students flock to "Sex" each year expecting nothing more than a collection of racy tidbits of sexual knowledge.

"I think our whole room is going to take `Sex' next semester," says Trey Grayson '94. "We all want to be sexual experts."

Bread and Beer

In one class, the desire to escape a gut reputation has led the professor to put the course on hold while he rethinks the course material and prepares a textbook to be used in 1992. Indeed, Bussey Professor of Biology Otto T. Solbrig was so upset when Science B-38: "Plants and Biological Principles in Human Affairs," became a popular gut that he may take it out of the Core.

Last year, many students considered "Plants" an easy way to get through the science requirement because of such enjoyable assignments as baking bread in lab to experiment with the properties of different types of flour and a field trip to a local brewery to observe the fermentation process.

But the first time Solbrig offered the course in 1989, the class was relatively small and consisted of about 50 students "genuinely interested in botany," Solbrig says.

The professor says he was dismayed last spring, because so many undergraduates took the course only to meet the requirement in the least stressful way possible.

"Too many students were taking the course because they thought it was easy and not because they were interested in plants," Solbrig said. "I am a little bit discouraged."

And students enrolled in "Plants" last year do comment that the course was notorious as a mindless way to receive credit for the Science B core, but they point out that the course was not in fact an easy "A."

"I heard that it was the easiest way to get rid of the requirement, but a lot of people were surprised grade-wise," Izzy Fernandez '93 said. "I would call it a `work gut' but definitely not a `grade gut.'"

Solbrig plans to increase the pace of the course in 1992 and possibly to switch "Plants" from the Core to the Biology Department so that only those students genuinely interested in the material would have reason to enroll.

One course that won't be upping its requirements in the foreseeable future is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities Robert Coles' General Education 105: "Literature of Social Reflection." Although the absence of a midterm or final exam has led students to call Coles" class a gut, he insists that the class--popularly called "Guilt"--is actually very demanding.

"It's not at all an easy course," Coles says. "There are sometimes hundreds of pages of reading a week. Many hundreds."

Coles says he does pay attention to write-ups from students, but says he has seen no reason to change the course in over a decade because of the continuing enthusiasm of its students.

He cites the example of a group of students who continued meeting with their section leader in a bar on John F. Kennedy St. to discuss Tolstoy's works after the course had ended.

"They met all spring to drink beer and discuss War and Peace," Coles said. "For me, that's what makes the course. Every time I think about toughening up the course...I think about that and say, `It must be working.'"