Word: essays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...educational process." Last week this statement by able Dean of Admissions Eugene S. Wilson of Amherst College sparked significant action at the annual meeting of the powerful College Entrance Examination Board in Manhattan. Speaking for 15 New England colleges, Dean Wilson had a fairly startling suggestion: add an English essay question to C.E.E.B.'s objective-question tests, the chief divining rod for admission to 287 U.S. colleges and universities. With some misgivings, the meeting finally approved Dean Wilson's urgent proposal. Result: next year, after a decade of multiple-choice questions, the famed "College Boards" will require words...
...answer. "Tests reward students who can remember, not interpret," says Dean Wilson. But to President Henry Chauncey of the Educational Testing Service (a C.E.E.B. offshoot), objective tests still seem the only solution for college applicants. Writing in the current Atlantic, he argues that objective tests are more accurate. An essay may be written badly by a good student in a state of fluster, or graded in a dozen ways by as many readers. As a one-shot gauge of college eligibility, says Chauncey, the essay is unfair and undependable...
Concerted Effort. But Chauncey is just as concerned as anyone about composition. He calls for "a tremendous concerted effort" to get U.S. students writing more often and better. The new C.E.E.B. essay question is not in itself a panacea. It will take an hour, cover three pages and not be scored. It will go to three colleges, of the student's choice, which can do what they will with it. But it may at last replace the usual pat "biography" required by colleges, and students will get no help from papa. More important, it may help U.S. schools...
...Most of C.E.E.B.'s Advanced Placement Pro gram tests already involve essay and discussion questions, even in science...
Concentration in the School concludes with a senior thesis (At Princeton, no sharp distinction is made between honors students and those who shuffle along in a non-honors program: everyone writes a senior thesis. There is also a three-part senior comprehensive examination,--an essay on a very broad question, a second essay on a set of field problems, and a rather specific question which is not, however, "course-oriented...