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 size ranges from a handful in tutorials to 18 or 20 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.
Students' tutors , as members of the faculty are called, meet with them twice a year in conferences to evaluate their intellectual performance in their presence and with their help. 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. The seminar presupposes that students are willing to submit their opinions to the scrutiny of their colleagues.