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Tutorial Studies

Program Chairman: Dennis J. Hutchinson, C 328, 702-3093
Secretary: Delores A. Jackson, C 330, 702-7148

Program of Study

Tutorial Studies is a program only in an administrative sense; it serves as an alternative for students who propose a coherent course of studies that clearly will not fit within a regular concentration. Students in the College may be admitted to Tutorial Studies at any point in their careers; their requirements will then be written to fill the time they have left until graduation. On the whole, the New Collegiate Division (NCD) prefers to admit students to this format late rather than early--for a senior year in Tutorial Studies rather than a two-year concentration and for two years rather than three. Admission to Tutorial Studies is handled separately from admission to other NCD programs.

Students in Tutorial Studies are held to all College requirements and to the NCD requirements, including the language requirement and the requirement of long independent papers in the junior and senior years (except that students admitted as seniors are not held to the junior paper). Tutorial Studies makes no other requirements of all students, but particular students may be held to certain requirements as judged appropriate by the tutor and the program chairman. All this, of course, is worked out in discussion with the student.

Students in Tutorial Studies have no concentration; instead, all students have a tutor--a member of the Chicago faculty who has agreed to take responsibility for their work. An individual student's education is worked out between the student and the tutor under the general supervision of the program chairman. Because of the special burden placed on the tutor, the rule states: the student and the tutor are admitted together. Students may enter Tutorial Studies only when they have found a tutor and after there has been sufficient discussion between student, tutor, and program chairman to establish to the satisfaction of all three that (1) the student knows what he or she wants to do, (2) the tutor understands it and wants to take charge of it, (3) it is something worth doing and something that will constitute an appropriate segment of a College education, (4) it can be done with the available resources, and (5) it cannot be done effectively within any existing College program.

A student in Tutorial Studies, like other NCD students, takes both regular courses and reading courses. Reading courses may be taken with members of the faculty other than the tutor.

In the past, successful Tutorial Studies students have generally belonged to one of two categories: (1) students who wish to focus on some relatively narrow topic--the poetry of Baudelaire, for example--but in a rather broad way, that is, in terms of poetics, culture history, psychology, and so on; or (2) students who wish to construct some more conventional program that the College does not offer: American studies, for instance, or education.

Program Requirements

Admissions to Tutorial Studies are made by the master of the New Collegiate Division upon the recommendation of the program chairman. In the nature of the case, requirements in Tutorial Studies can hardly be specified. It is expected that thirteen courses will be devoted to the immediate purposes of the student's project, of which several will be individual study courses with the principal tutor or other faculty members.

Grading, Transcripts, and Recommendations. The independent study and major papers required by the New Collegiate Division are best evaluated in faculty statements on the nature and quality of the work. In support of the independent study grades of Pass, Incomplete, and No Credit, faculty supervisors are asked to submit such statements to student files maintained in the NCD office. Responses to the major papers and copies of the papers themselves are also available in this collection of statements, which is used to support graduate applications and to evaluate NCD candidates for Phi Beta Kappa, College honors, and other awards. Students should request statements of reference from faculty with whom they have worked.

At the student's request, the registrar will include the following statement with each transcript:

The New Collegiate Division works with a small, selected group of students. There is less emphasis on letter grades than in other Collegiate Divisions and greater emphasis on independent work (NCD 299), including substantial papers submitted at the end of the junior and senior years. Students do some substantial portion of their work in close association with a tutor or tutors, and this work is graded Pass/No Pass only. Grades are supplemented with qualitative statements available from the Master, New Collegiate Division, The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637.

Honors. Honors are awarded in all the NCD concentrations. In Tutorial Studies the essential requirement for honors is an exceptionally distinguished senior paper. Papers considered worthy of honors by the initial readers are referred to a third reader whose identity is unknown to the student. In addition, honors depend on the student's grades, especially in the concentration; 3.25 is roughly the floor, but because a good deal of NCD work tends to be ungraded, the grade point standard cannot be stated precisely. Faculty evaluations of ungraded work are taken into account along with grades.

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