The amount of elective work required for the degree of A. B. at Harvard is twelve courses. It is necessary for the sake of justice that these represent a definite amount of knowledge. If the courses are not equivalent the one to another, one student who has passed in twelve easy courses may be less deserving of the degree than another who has passed in eleven course, but difficult ones.

It is no doubt the intention of the faculty that the several elective courses shall involve equal amounts of study; but they have discovered no adequate means of establishing and preserving an equality. The standard of value now used is the number of hours of instruction per week; the amount of work to be required of the student is left to the discretion of the individual instructors. They are of course not perfectly informed concerning the amount and thoroughness of work done in other electives; they must depend largely on what they observe in their own sections. No instructor would wish to condition most of the men taking his course; that elective in the following year would be avoided. If he finds the students are not doing the work assigned to them he is led to require less. Thus in the course of years each elective gains a reputation for hardness or "softness," and this reputation will attract students who will per petuate the same. It is a notorious fact that there are at present electives which no indolent student will choose, and others which few close students will enter. Thus every student is embarrassed in his choice of electives. Disinclination to hard work, ambition for collegiate honors, pecuniary dependence on high rank-each of these considerations closes to him certain electives and some whole branches of study. These motives, which ought not to be felt at all in shaping the students course, probably exert a larger influence than all others. He is drawn to studies which in themselves have no attraction for him, and repelled from studies in which he would take a genuine interest. The secret of the cure for this evil seems to be in the fact that it is the students who determine the amount of work required in each elective. A change suggested in the recent discussion of the question in our columns recognizes this fact. The plan is to represent the value of each elective by the ratio between the average marks which the members of that elective received in their freshman year, and their average marks in the elective. Some electives might thus be valued as high as 120 per cent., others as low as 80 per cent., of the standard course. But the adoption of the plan would at once alter these figures. Students would prefer three and a half hard courses to five easy ones; the standard of the one must fall and the other rise.