Word: student
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...content with that alone. Lowell immediately went on to further academic reform. Within a year the College had adopted his plan for concentration and distribution, which took first effect with the Class of 1914. Under President Eliot, any student who had successfully completed 16 courses was eligible for the degree. The free elective system imposed no limitations whatsoever upon the choice of courses or their relevance to each other, so that any student who could "cram and pass" 16 times in succession was graduated. Although Lowell had vigorously and consistently attacked the system while Eliot was still in office, nothing...
Lacking any systematic program of education, Lowell argued, students had come to regard course work as "an inconvenient ritual" and to assume that they "could hardly be expected to take true scholarship seriously." It was "clearly unfortunate," Lowell believed, for any student to spend four years in an atmosphere where scholarly interests were so unfashionable...
...which has become the basis of the present program in General Education. Beginning with the Class of 1914, the Administration required that six of the 16 courses for the degree be in a single field and six others spread among three different fields. This, they hoped, would force every student in the College to achieve Lowell's ideal of a scholar--"to know a little of everything and something well...
...Lowell, who had already established a wide reputation for being anything but complacent, set out on yet another academic crusade--tutorial. One of the most formidable criticisms of his plan for general examinations had been that the average student couldn't pass such an examination without help in preparing it. A tutorial system like that of Oxford or Cambridge was obviously the answer, but the University couldn't afford a staff of new tutors...
Thus in the first decade of his administration, Lowell had reshaped the pattern of undergraduate study and laid the foundations for a comparable change in student attitude. With the new requirements for concentration and distribution, tutorial, and general examinations, undergraduates found their academic life substantially changed. The would-be dissipators could no longer expect to graduate on a few weeks of annual cramming and only the very industrious could hope to graduate in three years...