Word: summas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...these, none is more dreaded or reviled than the oral examination, the supposed summation of all that has gone before. Some students change entire plans of study just to avoid them. In the History and Literature department, an all-honors concentration, orals are required for high honors (magna or summa cum laude), no matter what one's academic standing...
...ALREADY prepped for improper judgements from what had happened to my thesis: my first reader begrudged me a cum plus, saying I didn't prove any of my points, I was a sexist, and had made too many typos. My second reader gave me a summa minus, saying that while there were flaws, chapters 2, 5 and 6 were terrific. So it was given to a third reader because of the discrepancy; she also awarded a summa minus, but said that by far the strongest chapters were numbers 3 and 4. With this foreknowledge of subjectivity and chance, I felt...
...learned later from an insider that I'd actually failed my orals, though I'm not supposed to know this. Children, for god's sake, don't doubt your elders. I may be the first Harvard student to get two summa readings and a prize for a separate essay and yet fail his orals. I'm still graduating honors, but not before being forced to realize what a flop I'll be at cocktail parties. As of now I'm unemployed, but I think I have a future writing Salada tea bags...
...Brodkey '51. As the story begins a Harvard senior named Wiley looks at the object of his lust and states, "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die." Naturally, when Wiley lures this apparition into his room and under his covers, it is the occasion for a summa cum laude display of erudition...
After graduating summa cum laude from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. in 1978, she worked as a teller at a local bank and three months later parlayed her one college computer course into a job in the computer section the bank was forming. Less than a year later, she was asked to become head of the operation. But she decided to study linguistics at Harvard instead. "Four years of Walla Walla was all anyone could stand," she explains...