Wabash College - Wabash Yearbook (Crawfordsville, IN)

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Comps. What can you Say sdDOU be COMps: menar you (honestly) worried about them? That for a month your future hung in the balance as you an- xlously awaited the re- sults? Probably not — a few years ago perhaps, but not now. Of course there were a few guys who gro- veled away, leafing through yellowed CCI notes or pouring over BIO 3 lab manuals. But for the majority of us it was just a pain in the glutimus maximus — one more test of our ability to temporarily cram our heads with information which we can safely discard the moment comps are over. And the fact that they’ve been around as long as anyone can remember is not valid justifica- tion for their existance. Not that comps aren’t worth continuing, but are they worth continuing in their present form? The idea behind giving comprehensive exams is after all, reasonable. If after four years of college you don’t know something about something, then something is wrong. And something ts wrong, but it’s not comps. It’s the people who give them. It’s hard not to sympathize with the faculty, though. Who would want to grade all those exams just three weeks after the hassle of first semester finals and grades? And orals — talk about time consuming! Then its neces- sary to decide whether the student has passed with fly- ing colors (distinction), merely with colors (high pass), or just passed (you guessed it — pass).

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A Wabash man is probably the least regulated student in the world. Passed down through the years, our one rule states that we must act like gentlemen at all times. But | even the interpretation of this rule has changed over time. Aside from being a gentleman, we can: A have cars. B live off-campus, if we | desire. | C drink anywhere, anytime. The end result: A+ B+C = Girls

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Maybe we just need someone to dump on when a tradition rubs us the wrong way, and in this case the faculty is an easy target. But if we didn’t lose any sleep, over comps, why complain about them? Maybe because there’s something in comps worth preserving, and if we’re not careful the good will be sacrificed along with the bad. What’s good about comps? Well certainly not questions which are merely “super finals” and do nothing but separ- ate the men from the IBM machines. And not the half- hearted fashion in which comps are given — and taken — as though we're all performing an annual pennance merely to open the way to a diploma. But there’s another side of comps — the oral exam. Even orals can become a drag, expecially when some prof decides to play the ever-popular quiz game, “‘Guess What I’m Thinking”, and there are still some questions as to exactly what the oral is to entail (the role of the third man, for instance). But the oral provides a forum for broad-ranging discussion — discussion of what the students has learned outside the classroom as well as in it. In short, what the ““Wabash Experience” has meant to him personally. It should be a time for self-evalua- tion, criticism, and a relation of the Wabash education to life itself. Maybe fifty minutes isn’t enough. Comps, like all-male education, intramurals, camara- derie between students and faculty, and boring weekends, are part of the “‘Wabash Experience.” But something had better be done soon before they become merely another thing we endure here at Wab-Col. In case anyone has forgotten, you have to pass comps to graduate, and such a powerful weapon should not be wielded with such apparent lack of purpose.