Word: exam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...there really is no reason for it. Oh, as long as the rules demand a "good excuse" for being absent from an exam, the Ad Board must enforce them. But that particular set of rules is of dubious value...
Threatening to punish us if we don't take our exams smacks of paternalism that is, or should be, anachronistic. Prohibiting indiscriminate exam make-ups was probably of value when Harvard College was devoted to squeezing the rudiments of a liberal arts education into the minds of the sons of alumni, before they went off to law school, medical school, or were absorbed into papa's firm. Harvard students then, if given responsibility to decide whether to take an exam when regularly scheduled or instead to take it the following make-up period, might have dug themselves into impossibly deep...
...more make-ups. But Harvard is no longer a haven for the dilletante sons of the idle rich (our dilletantes are middle class). Most of us are fairly highly motivated. It would do no real harm to permit a student to take one or two make-up exams per term simply because he wanted to, offering no more elaborate excuse than that he was not prepared for the exam...
...allow the premise that most of us are really interested in getting a decent education, and that we will, in the long run, be fairly prudent in doing so, it seems likely that we will take out exams on schedule. Most of use realize the disadvantages of postponing an exam and will be reluctant to do so unless it is truly necessary. For the rest, the experience of two make-ups in April will be enough to bring those disadvantages home...
...looked around. It was Monday morning, January 27, 1969. Two days before, he had been taking an English exam; now he sat cross-legged on a soft brown rug in a small cabin called Firo, looking out over the Pacific Ocean. Two days before, 11 people had been killed by a mud-slide in Southern California, a result of the worst flooding in the state in 31 years; now it was bright and sunny, and far below the surf was pounding in against the shore...