They change our minds, move our hearts and touch our spirits. What they have to tell us is not something of merely academic concern or remote from our real interests. They serve to foster thinking, not to dominate it. With a faculty-student ratio of 1 to 8, class sizes range from a handful in tutorials to eighteen or twenty in seminars and laboratories and the entire student body for one weekly lecture. All classes are discussion classes, so that the students participate directly and actively in their own education.
Final examinations are oral and individual.
Grades are neither distributed nor discussed. The seminar is the heart of the St. John's program. Its business is the discussion of the books. Two tutors preside, but the seminar is almost exclusively student conversation. One tutor begins the seminar with a question on the assigned book, a question to which he or she may have no answer.