When pressed, he says he applied sometime in the summer, explaining that Harvard was more of a regional college in the 1950s and had more flexibility in boosting the number of its matriculators after the deadline.

Though the College has changed through the years, the admission application has remained surprisingly constant.

"It hasn't really changed according to any pattern," says L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of the college, who was dean of admissions and financial aid from 1972 and 1985.

"The essay question has always been the product of internal decisions by the admissions committee," Jewett says, "but with no particular trend--things have been tried and then given up, and then sometimes we came back to them."

The "directory" questions concerning addresses, parents, siblings and test scores have also stayed more or less the same in recent decades.

Questions about the race and religion of applicants, a hotly debated topic in bygone days, have been dictated by state and federal laws in recent years.

"In the 1960s and early 70s, Massachusetts law said any questions about race or religion had to be precluded," Jewett says.

But that was superseded when federal laws requiring the College to keep affirmative action information took effect, and the college included optional questions that helped it maintain statistics.

Malin, who sat on the admissions committee from 1965 to 1987, agrees that the Harvard application mostly stayed the same, until now.

"The introduction of the computer to help order applications meant we put a preliminary application page into effect, but there was nothing comparable to the impact of the common application," he says