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.

Suggestions

It seems clear that those most clearly seeing a subject from the work point of view are the students who have been doing it for a few years, i.e.. Honours students. If, therefore, a committee of these students in different advanced subjects was set up the fresher could go to them and find out what the fascinating name he found in the Calendar really means. It can be argued that this is firstly the staff's job and secondly that an honours student has a distorted view of his subject.

Objections Overruled

In answer to the first objection the staff are definitely not fulfilling this function. In a final evolution of this function, if practised, we would have the suggested regimentation suggested at the meeting of the Auckland Board that in B.Sc. courses the student is told what subjects to take according to what he is advancing. This is steretypy in its worst form and when, if ever, put into practise, we'll be able to advertise ourselves as a night school quite openly.

The second objection can be answered by the fact that the committee will be composed of students from all subjects and thus biasses will tend to cancel. Also it would be endeavoured to have average people and not the very brilliant ones as advisers. I don't think that there would be very much trouble in getting people to sit on this committee as most honours students want to help freshers along.

I invite correspondence about this plan giving your opinions and suggestions for on them depends the final judgment whether the scheme is practicable or not.