For whatever reasons, the CEP voted to approve pass-fail in principle two weeks after Norr's testimony.
Letting students take one of their four courses without grades has turned out not to be as simple as it sounds. Some of the many difficulties spotted in the last month and a half are trivial: Honors seniors don't have to take finals if they get an honor grade on spring hour exams. Should a "pass" on an hour exam exempt a senior from the final?
Other problems are more substantial and are still unresolved. The Faculty decided not to try to stiffen the Harvard definition of "pass" for purposes of pass-fail, but individuals may still be able to impose a stricter definition on their own courses.
Under the CEP legislation, an instructor has the right to bar pass-fail from his course. Few are likely to be so blunt. "It would be churlish of an instructor to say 'take me 100 per cent or not at all,'" Riesman comments; "I think most can be chided out of such totalism."
But already Faculty members are talking about setting quotas on the number of pass-fail students they will admit next fall, and it will be psychologically difficult for an instructor to turn away students who want to take his course for a grade and give the places to pass-fail students.
Individual departments will decide whether concentrators under their jurisdiction will be able to count pass-fail courses toward degree requirements. Neither Princeton nor Brown allows students to use pass-fail this way, and there is little reason to believe that Harvard departments will give students free rein. Science departments with sequential courses will probably be especially reluctant to let students use pass-fail within their field. And almost every department is likely to require that its basic course be taken with a grade by concentrators.
Perhaps the most intriguing administrative question is what relation pass-fail will have to General Education. Princeton allows pass-fail to be used for distribution requirements; Brown does not, but neither has an elaborately structured Gen Ed program like Harvard's. Wilcox wants a rule that will let students take only one of