in a department of the school. Provision was also made for. required work in written and spoken English and a reading knowledge of two foreign languages.
The first of the survey courses, that in philosophy and religion prepared by Dr. Alton and Dr. Bewkes, was offered in 1928. Thereafter came biological sciences in 1929; the physical sciences, social sciences, and fine arts in 1930. Since these courses were pioneer cooperative efforts, instructors, drawn from various departments of each school, had to prepare the instructional materials and help each other in the fields where they had no training, and often did their best teaching in what they knew least about because they had to “dig” before meeting their classes. In due time course manuals evolved from mimeographed pages into published textbooks by Harper-Art in the Western World (1935), The Human Organism and the World of Life and Atoms, Rocks and Galaxies (both 1938), and Men, Groups and the Community and Experience, Faith and Reason (both 1940). They won adoption in several colleges which established general education courses.
Honors courses, designed to provide exceptionally able seniors with the opportunity for independent study and to encourage high intellectual attainment, were instituted in 1925, on recommendation of the Committee on Scholastic Standards, as an experiment in four departments. Tutorial seminars, begun on a voluntary basis in 1931 and required of all juniors and seniors beginning in 1934 when the Colgate Plan was in full operation, superseded the honors courses but held to somewhat similar objectives. Each student took a seminar in his department of concentration both semesters of his last two years and was thus enabled to have dose contact with his instructor and to meet weekly with his associates for discussion of the papers they had prepared. The seminar system, which was not peculiar to Colgate, won general approval though there was some question of its value for the less capable students.
The capstone of the Colgate Plan was the comprehensive examination, introduced in 1932, in the field of concentration, required of all seniors following a reading period. Heretofore it had been possible for seniors to avoid final examinations their last semester if they had the requisite general or course standing. The faculty felt that the college course should end in a climax bringing together for analysis and