Biology Department Is Second Science To Offer Tutorial

The Biology Department's decision to offer individual instruction to honors candidates is the latest in a long series of experiments with the College's tutorial program.

The outlines of the present program were established in Feb. 1961, with the adoption by the Faculty of the Gill plan. The plan, allows students who can satisfy certain minimal requirements to enroll in Junior and Senior tutorial, and to write a thesis.

Students in the Natural Sciences were exempted from the new plan, since the science departments had declined to offer tutorial instruction in recent years. But the Biology Department has become the second science field in the last two years to inaugurate an undergraduate tutorial program.

Last Fall the Chemistry Department inaugurated a program of reading and discussion groups, and research projects for a limited number of sophomores and juniors. The Department later revealed plans for a more extensive program, under which juniors and seniors would receive course credit for supervised research projects.

Individual and group tutorial has been offered continuously since 1926 to students concentrating in the field of Biochemical Sciences. When the program was first begun, Alwin M. Pappenheimer, chairman of the Board of Tutors, reported that all of the science departments except Chemistry offered tutorial. These gradually died out by the Second World War, but are being revived.

In contrast to the renascence of tutorial in the Natural Sciences, departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences have been narrowing and intensifying their programs. The most notable instance of this was the English Department's decision last spring to restrict junior tutorial for credit to students in Groups I and II.

Although the Gill plan had taken notice of the possibility of enrolling students in non-honors tutorial, the presumption was "that in most departments a student would take tutorial for credit in his junior year."