A Course is a Course is a Course

But the curriculum of the average American college is not planned in a way that makes this course very feasible. On the other hand, many students—teachers especially—who want to collect a degree while supporting themselves at some full-time work, do so by attending summer schools. Here work is said to be intensive in spite of the holiday atmosphere; in say a three month period. 4 student may gain two or more credits. An excellent example of this sort of study is given by the Foreign Language summer schools held by a famous womens college. Mount Holyoke. I believe. Students have to pledge not to speak anything but the language they are studying for the whole course. Experts in the language, usually nationals, give lectures, conduct discussion groups, and expect thorough preparation for their classes. Students graduate from such courses with excellent accents, and a practical working vocabulary which covers their everyday needs (they wouldn't get far in camp life without it!). Such courses are more possible for teachers because their holidays, maybe because of the heat, seem to be somewhat longer than ours. That may be one reason why American children leave high school a year older than ours, and take four years to complete the average B.A. course.

The colleges I visited seemed to offer both a wider variety of subjects to undergraduates, and a more rigid insistence on a planned programme of studies than Victoria does. Nearly everybody takes four years over their first degree—it's the exceptional student who graduates in three and a half years, ending up out of step with his or her classmen.

The concept of a "class", as the group of people graduating together from a university is of course, almost completely absent from the University of New Zealand. For most of us—and we're still generally part-timers—no certain prediction can be made on the day we matriculate as to the day we will graduate. It's certain that a lot of us won't graduate at all. On the contrary, the American student, unless quite unfitted for university studies (and the better universities have entrance tests designed to prove all the students accepted capable of profiting from further education and of graduating from college) is expected by everyone to emerge, diploma in hand, at a certain definite Commencement. The "Class of '52" is thus all those students now in their last, or senior, year at college, who are expected to graduate next June.