However, many students dislike the changes to the Faculty policy.

"It is unfair that seniors this year have a smaller probability of getting summas than seniors last year," says Marc R. Talusan '97, an English concentrator.

Summa nominee in social studies Jedediah S. Purdy '97 agrees.

"Students should not be answer-able to standards they weren't aware of when they began their academic careers," he says.

Purdy also says he dislikes the Faculty's decision to factor elective grades into summa considerations.

"It tends to penalize adventurous people who take electives outside their field of strength," he says.

A General Problem?

An additional concern has been the value of general exams, which some individuals now regard as archaic.

Last year, the government and history departments both abolished general exams from their honors requirements.

"There has been a steady trend to abolish generals over the past twenty years," Pilbeam wrote in an e-mail. "This reflects a growing liberalization and specialization within concentrations [because] students take quite disparate course schedules within concentrations and...there is no overall syllabus for a particular concentration."

Other departments are faced with the question of changing their traditional systems.

About one-third of all undergraduate English concentrators sent in a petition this year asking the department to abolish general exams. Talusan, one the organizers of the petition, says that "the idea of a unified canon is obsolete."

He said the generals unfairly judge the quality of a program based on the obsolete "great books" academic standard.

"My program of study is just as valid, just as rigorous as any other," he adds.

He says he was down-graded to cum with summa ratings in everything else because he wrote a protest essay instead of answering the questions in his generals.