In my opinion there are many students who have not this second advantage and are too shy to talk very openly to a lecturer or professor about their gifts or deficiencies. Take for example the case of a student I happened to meet last year who was doing four pure reading Arts subjects. He was advancing only one of them and mentioned that he was going to take two renownedly easy subjects later in his course. He naturally failed two of his four subjects. Now what did this student need?

Obviously if somebody had told him the standard of the different subjects he could have done his four in first year—if he was so determined—composed of two large reading subjects and two more common-sense ones. In his second year he could then have done his other two. In this way he would have completed his degree taking all the subjects he desired in a balanced system rather than an off-skew loading on one year. However, nobody had told him about it so he had to pay for it with failure.