Remedial Expos Coming Next Fall

Beginning next fall, students who perform poorly on a Freshman Week writing test will be encouraged to roll in a remedial expository writing course.

"Expose 5, "which gained Faculty approval Wednesday, will offer freshman with severe writing problems an extra semester of intensive instruction.

No student will be required to take be new course, and students who roll will still have to take a regular spots course in the spring to meet the expository writing requirement.

The remedial program's introduction may be accompanied by a lightening of standards in the regular sections, which Director of the Expository Writing Program Richard Marius said are "not as high as they should be."

In endorsing "Expos 5," the Faculty Council--the Faculty's 19 member steering committee-acknowledged a problem that Marius has been bemoaning for years even at Harvard, many students aren't writing as well as they should be.

"Harvard writing relative to writing at other schools is pretty good, but on an absolute scale, it is pretty poor," Marius said.

"Expos 5 "was designed to help "those students who lack competence in writing that would allow them to do satisfactory work at Harvard, "Marius said in a written proposal to the Faculty.

The Expos Department will at

tempt to identify students who belong in the course using results from a newly developed diagnostic test along with writing samples from admissions applications.

The test was administered to freshmen on an experimental basis last September and apparently proved a reliable predictor of their performance.

Mather House Senior Tutor Terry Shaller, a former expos instructor and author of the test, said a computer analyses revealed a strong correlation between low test scores and low grades in expos during the fall term.

Students targeted as potential problem writers--including some students for whom English is a second language--will be advised to take "Expos 5" when they receive their scores from other Freshman Week placement tests.

"The hope is that people who really need it will enroll in it. I think they will," Shaller said.

Marius said he has scheduled two "Expos 5" sections for next fall and expects a total enrollment of 20 to 25 students. The course will be listed simply as "Expos 5" to avoid attaching a "pejorative" title, he noted.

According to a tentative syllabus, the course will combine frequent writing assignments with extensive feedback from the instructor. "We're not going to drill people in grammar-all the research shows that drilling people in grammar doesn't carry over lose their writing Marius said.

The course will replace another expos class assigned to help students with special needs.

When Marius took the helm of the Expos Department seven years ago, he introduced a one-on-one tutorial program offered each spring for students who earn unsatisfactory grades in fall expos classes. Freshmen who score 550 or lower on the verbal part of the Scholastic have been placed in first semester expos sections so they can take advantage of the spring tutorial, "Expos 14hf," if necessary.

That system evidently proved inefficient and contributed to undue anguish on the part of frustrated writing students.

"We felt that it was backward and to gave them special work after they've gone through regular expos," Marius said yesterday