MIND OVER MEMORY

Often it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and this point might well be applied to the number of essays that should be assigned in those courses frequently taken by the senior class. Each year, members of that learned group find themselves caught with an honors thesis and a great many course papers outside their field from which they can not be excused. Most deeply submerged are concentrators in History-Literature and Bio-Chemistry, for, belonging to no formal department, they find it very difficult to get excused from an overdoes of essays seven inside their field. To alleviate the distress it would be more satisfactory if the supervision of such problems passed from the hands of the individual departments to a central body.

As it is now, each department or division passes judgment on its concentrators; and while the are no general regulations, a student is usually excused from writing more than the equivalent of one thesis in his field. But no such leniency is allowed toward course papers in other subjects, since they are outside a single department's jurisdiction. This leaves some men in the simple departments of study and a large number in the combination fields with more papers than they can handle, and very little they can do about it.

Centralization is the only way out of the dilemma. The efficient methods used to discover the number of essays assigned in each course could be transferred from the departments to a central bureau, placed under the direction of the various tutorial offices. With the assistance of the tutorial system, direct contact could be maintained with the problems of the students; the number and length of essays, not their subject, would be the determinant factor, and the graduating class would not longer have to steer clear of every course with a trace of written work attached to it.

Thus the last drawback would be removed to the practice of including prepared essays in as many courses as possible. If ghost writing were eliminated and the burden on seniors from too many written papers relieved, the advantages from such a course of action should convince even the most conservative members of the University that an essay is a more searching and a more accurate test of a student's ability than an hour exam.