Word: failed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under the pass-fail option, Harvard will in large part retain a graded system upon which graduate admissions committees will make their judgments. This will necessarily be based on three course grades since the fourth course graded pass-fail will provide little if any information. The pressure to achieve high grades will thus be concentrated on three courses rather than four. The fourth course, pass-fail, is thus likely to receive little attention from students once the first hourlies must be faced. The sorts of efforts which the need for a "passing" grade may induce need not be dwelled upon...
...into three courses is by no means a reflection on the student body's ambition or initiative, nor that grades are a necessary means of soliciting effort (though they are clearly important since no one appears to regard the right to audit as a suitable substitute for a pass-fail fourth course); rather, this is an inevitable result of the pressure to achieve grades created externally from the use of grade averages, the relief of which is the accepted motive, and rightly so, for the current proposal. Moreover, this concentration in efforts by students to three courses will almost surely...
...likely to result in a considerable disadvantage to those students who either decide in or change their major field "late" in their four years, or who choose to do graduate work in a field other than their major. To these groups of students the chance to choose the pass-fail option in their last year or two will be foreclosed by the need at that point to take and present a graded record of accomplishment in courses important to graduate school admission...
Graduate school admission may, in fact, induce students, especially upperclassmen, to reject the pass-fail option on the supposition that, all other things equal, four courses with fine grades is a better showing than three (and many admissions committees will face large numbers of applicants where, indeed, all other things do appear equal...
That such a concentration in education which would result from the present pass-fail proposal is not intended is evidenced by the rejection in the December faculty meeting of Professor Handlin's proposal of a simple three graded course system. To the extend that the incentive structure implicit in the present pass-fail proposal has been appropriately represented above, this vote on Handlin's amendment is essentially a rejection of the present pass-fail proposal. What is at issue is not the objective, but the means; the pass-fail option as presently proposed is clearly unsatisfactory...