Word: summa
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...McDonnell Aircraft Corp., of which his brother James S. McDonnell Jr. is president. An Arkansas cotton merchant's son, who peddled papers as a child "because I wanted to stand on my own two feet"-and now keeps them both conservatively on the ground-Banker McDonnell graduated (summa cum laude) from Vanderbilt University in 1917, worked up through Little Rock banks before moving to St. Louis in 1944, where he became the First National's president in 1948, its chairman last year...
...summa is a hard-to-get commodity, and the Social Sciences area is the worst place to do the shopping. The recent report to the Faculty on this uneven situation merits consideration and action from those departments which were cited for their relatively high number of summas, as well as from those with a relatively low total. The report revealed that the fields of English, Government, Biochemistry, and especially Economics and History awarded far fewer summas to students who, on the basis of grades, would be qualified, than most fields in the Humanities and Natural Sciences...
...present the "A" student in Economics, for example, has approximately one-fourth the chance of receiving a summa than his counterpart has in Physics or Mathematics. While this might be partially explained by the nature of the fields (or the age at which significant contributions are made in the sciences as opposed to the social sciences), the discrepancy is far too large. The student in the social sciences should be placed in a more even competitive position...
Several corrections for the present imbalance could be adopted. Primarily, the natural sciences could stiffen their requirements and raise the present standards for summa candidates. The social sciences might consider a slight liberalization of their standards for a summa, although rigid requirements are preferable to lenient ones...
...probably easier to select the brilliant scientist on an undergraduate level than it is to choose the highly talented historian. Certainly no department should award summas on a quota basis. On the other hand, the criteria should be harmonized so that the qualified student, regardless of field of concentration, has a fair chance to be graduated summa cum laude...