One After the Other

The preliminary Study Card perched on every student's desk is an expendable nuisance. While it affords freshmen an excuse for hashing over study plans with departmental advisers, it is practically useless for upperclassmen--except perhaps to remind them that next fall is nearer than they like to think. The Card can prove an expensive reminder at that, for if students ignore it past May 1, they must pay a ten dollar fine.

Supposedly, the Preliminary Study Card is used to tip off course instructors on how many students they can expect in their fall classes, and to give the Registrar's Office an inkling of how large a room each course needs. But so far it has been at best a faculty indicator. Comes the first meetings of fall courses and the Registrar is beseiged by lecturers, each frantic because his class is overflowing its assigned lecture halls. Actually, the enrollment of a year before is a more accurate guide to planning than the hasty and speculative decisions that appear on the typical study card.

The Card is also used as an excuse for sending the non-honors upperclassman on his third visit to his adviser for guidance on course selecting. But now that everyone in the five largest departments will receive tutorial, far fewer students needs this special advice.

There remains but one group that elimination of the Preliminary Study Card would hamper: it includes those undergraduates who are goaded by the Card into seriously considering their next year's program. But even these students will find little point in mulling over their full schedules far in advance when there is no Preliminary Announcement of Courses of Instruction booklet to help them. It would be singularly frustrating to select four courses in the spring, only to find next fall that they conflict with each other or no longer exist.

Therefore, to save students from spring-time annoyance and fall-time disillusionment, the Preliminary Study Card should follow the Preliminary Course book into oblivion.