The General College Develops its Comprehensive Examination
A LTHOUGH comprehensive examinations are not new, considerable thought is now being directed toward improving them and articulating them more closely with the curriculum. Within the last three years the staff of the General College of the University of Minnesota has made a radical change in its use of such examinations. When the College was formulating its curriculum and practices in the early I930's, the idea of comprehensive examinations appealed to the faculty as a desirable means of determining student progress. One of the avowed purposes in setting up a program of general education had been to avoid the excessive compartmentalization of knowledge resulting from a variety of unrelated introductory courses. The comprehensive examination, administered at the end of a year's work, was presumed to evaluate the student's grasp of overall relationships. Therefore, in blocking out the curriculum, courses were set up in large groups-varying in different years from seven to twelvewhich had enough in common so that performance on a comprehensive examination would indicate how well the student had retained and integrated his learning. Over a major period since the General College was organized, students completing a twoyear program were required to pass six comprehensive examinations to qualify for the degree Associate in Arts. So great was the faith in this means of evaluation that, at first, a student's achievement was determined primarily by his standing on the comprehensive examination rather than by his marks in individual courses. This idealistic notion could withstand neither the onslaughts of the traditional-mindedness of college students and their parents nor the necessity for keeping scholastic records comparable to those of other colleges. As time went on, the staff began to realize uneasily that it was caught in a dilemma. It wanted to retain the comprehensive requirement; yet it became increasingly difficult to make out students' programs quarter by quarter in such a way that every student would have adequate preparation for three such examinations each year. A further difficulty was that students frequently registered for courses in which they had little interest-and sometimes for which they had no real need-merely to meet the comprehensive-examination requirement. The staff therefore decided in I942 to experiment with reducing the re-