Exceptionally Exceptional

"By the time the exceptional student reaches college, he has had eight years' training in how not to be exceptional. The unusual student who can survive all this--the destruction of initiative, the repression of spontaneity--is exceptionally exceptional." So spoke California Institute of Technology Psychologist John R. Weir last week at a round-table discussion of Caltech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology educators on how to cope with the exceptionally exceptional student.

The professionals gathered in Caltech's Dabney Hall in Pasadena were well qualified to speak on the subject. Among them: M.I.T.'s President James R. Killian Jr., Caltech's President Lee A. Du-Bridge, M.I.T.'s Dean (engineering) Carl Richard Soderberg, Caltech's Physicist and Mathematician Robert F. Bacher, M.I.T.'s Gordon S. Brown (electrical engineering). Almost without exception M.I.T. and Caltech freshmen are the scholastic cream skimmed off the top 10% of national high school enrollment. "It's the rare Caltech student whose IQ falls below 130," explained Psychologist Weir. "The average is somewhere around 140." (A classification amounting to "very superior.") To single out the elite of this exceptional group, M.I.T. and Caltech are looking for something beyond pure IQ. They want, said M.I.T. Vice President Jtflius Stratton, "boys with the passionate interest in developing themselves."

Free Rovers. Physicist Bacher described one way of doing it. At Caltech, he reported, there is now a course known only as Physics X, conducted by Dr. Richard Feynman for students with top-grade averages. It carries no academic credit and is totally unplanned. Theoretical Physicist Feynman has established only two course rules: "Questions can't be prompted by some other Caltech course, and they have to be prompted by some natural phenomenon." In 18 months Feynman's gifted students, mostly sophomores and juniors, have pushed far beyond the standard range into subjects, e.g., quantum mechanics and relativity, that normally belong to the graduate years.

The same effect might be achieved by letting a student skip his bachelor's degree and go straight on in four years to get his master's, suggested M.I.T.'s Brown. M.I.T.'s Killian had an even more provocative suggestion: unfettered academic freedom for a small, experimental group of hand-picked freshmen, "a complete tutorial system, in which the boys are allowed to develop under the direction of a volunteer group of faculty members, to proceed without requirements to attend classes, and be expected at the end to meet the requirements for graduation." Said Killian: "Their motivations would be to solve complicated problems and to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, rather than to complete courses of instruction, go to class or get good grades."

Spotty Spotters. But some thought that total freedom was unwise. "Most college freshmen, at 17, aren't secure enough to tolerate the absence of intellectual con trols without anxiety," said Psychologist Weir. Added Caltech's George Beadle: "Isn't there a fallacy in complete freedom? Most of us have to have a push to get things done." M.I.T.'s Soderberg: "Since our students are relatively immature at the beginning of college, completely unrestricted freedom probably can't be applied until the third year."

How to spot the budding genius in time? Ideally, said Weir, it should be done at the secondary level. But this is often impossible because, of 22 or so schools in the U.S. that train teachers to handle ex ceptional children, all but two schools are interested in training them for "the exceptionally handicapped, rather than the exceptionally bright." Added Caltech's Frederick Lindvall: "There's a stigma attached to being called a brain. The athletic department is much more successful than we are at singling out its exceptional students."

However difficult it might be to locate the highly exceptional student, the educators agreed that it was worth the search. Summed up M.I.T.'s Antoine Gaudin: "When we find him, it's like love: you know it's there, but you don't know how it came about."

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