Help for the Brightest

Stanford University, often called the "Harvard of the West,"* has no problem filling its freshman class each year with straight-A students. Because good grades came so easily to these students in high school, however, many enter Stanford with slovenly and inefficient study habits. To their dismay, they discover that they have trouble handling the university's more rigorous academic demands.

Stanford has responded with a remedial program for the bright: the Learning Assistance Center (LAC), which offers courses in how to take classroom notes, use the library, prepare term papers, and budget study time efficiently. LAC, begun in 1972, now teaches more than 50% of Stanford's 1,500 freshmen; some of them, among the brightest in their class, enroll simply to improve their competitive edge. The center also is open to upperclassmen, graduate students and faculty members who want to learn more efficiently. Stanford considers the courses so valuable that it even gives credit for them.

Funny and Clownlike. By far the most crowded class at the center is LAC-10, a three-credit course in reading skills. It was set up when administrators learned that first-year Stanford students score in the 60-70 percentile range in nationwide tests of college freshmen reading skills. "At Stanford, that's low," explains LAC Director Michael McHargue. "People here don't know that anything below 90% exists." LAC-10 instructors teach students how to skim a chapter in a textbook for the important points and how to build up their vocabulary.

They also encourage students to be discerning and to recognize an author's bias. A spin-off of LAC-10, a reading-writing course, is also well attended. While TIME Correspondent Joseph Boyce sat in on a class last week, students were asked what came to mind when presented with each of several different adjectives meaning fat. Sample answers: for paunchy, "beerbelly"; corpulent, "overweight but dignified"; fleshy, "yuck, flabby"; burly, "a lumberjack or truck driver"; roly-poly, "funny, clownlike."

LAC has become one of the most popular institutions at Stanford--largely because it seems to work. "I got a lot out of LAC-10," says Debbie Sloss, a junior. "I see things much more analytically now." Admits Bill Shankle, a junior and a graduate of a LAC study-skills course: "One finds that even if he is just innately a genius, he has got to study."

* Except in Palo Alto, where Harvard is called the "Stanford of the East."

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