Word: failed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...real surprise though came earlier, when the pass-fail plan got the CEP's blessing in November. "We've acted so long on the assumption that it wouldn't be approved that we hardly know what to think or do, now that pass-fail is here," Henry R. Norr '68, president of the Harvard Policy Committee said recently. Norr and other veteran pass-fail warriors had been led to believe that the Faculty and its CEP were hostile to the fourth course idea and they have a hard time explaining just what went right this fall...
...undoubtedly swayed by the single strongest argument for pass-fail which has been constantly repeated during the two-year debate. David Riesman '31, Henry Ford II Professor of Social Science, states it best: "Most students here take too many courses. They chop their emotional energies into too many little bits. We should be encouraging students to play from weakness instead of strength, but the system here puts pressure on the student not to extend himself in areas where he's awkward because he fears not doing brilliantly...
...addition, there were some new twists to the case for pass-fail this year. Cynics would argue that Harvard was nudged into action by Yale's new pass-fail and the publicity that surounded it. The CEP vote to approve pass-fail in principle came less than a week after the Yale Faculty switched that college's grading to four categories: fail, pass, high pass, and honors...
...more likely that the pass-fail plan won approval because Faculty think it is what students want. The HPC, by concentrating on this one question, won over a Faculty that could have gone either way. An indifferent Faculty member who could not think of a good reason for rejecting the plan was willing to try the experiment...
...chief engineer of this modest student power coup is Norr, who has worked on pass-fail through every phase of its tangled history. He was a member of the 1966-67 HPC which hit upon the idea one spring afternoon of combining its desire for a free fifth course and pass-fail into one package proposal...