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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE yet come to establish a vocational guidance department, it commended the efforts already being made and urged that they be expanded.229 The premedical program is a good example of long and continuing College concern about student career interests. With the blessing of both his teaching colleagues and the trustees, in 1896 Professor Stahley had devised a program in biology, chemistry, and physics which qualified its graduates to enter the second year of those medical schools which were then adopting four-year curricula. For the next quarter century all, or virtually all, Gettysburg premedical students worked closely with Bones Stahley. In the March 21, 1929 issue of the Gettysburgian he recalled the names of about twenty former students who were now successful physicians, most of whom had completed their work at The Johns Hopkins University or University of Pennsylvania Medical School. In the 1920s, after Stahley's retirement, the faculty spent much time discussing the kind of premedical program which would be best for Gettysburg students. Together with the trustees, they eventually decided that they would no longer recommend anyone to a medical school after only two years of undergraduate work. In 1927 the catalogue stated for the first time that premedical students might major in chemistry as well as biology. A major nationwide change in medical school admissions occurred in the fall of 1930 when, after two years of study, the Association of American Medical Colleges adopted an aptitude test and most medical schools began requiring it of all candidates for admission. The purpose was to reduce the troublesome dropout rate of more than 20 percent by introducing what the association hoped would become a generally reliable indicator of probable success in medical school. This test, later widely known as the Medical College Admission Test, was first administered on the campus in February 1931. Near the end of the 1930s a crisis in premedical education developed at Gettysburg. In December 1938 President Hanson, who much preferred to present the positive and bright side of things to 229The June 8,1935 Gettysburgian reported that in the fall Robert B. Rau, a junior, would teach typewriting and shorthand, in part because of the return of women students. The 1941 catalogue announced for the first time two courses in each subject, both noncredit, which Rau, now the president's secretary, was offering. President Hanson told the board in May 1941 that representatives of such firms as Burroughs Adding Machine; Procter and Gamble; Sears, Roebuck, and Company; and Goodyear had visited the campus in search of employees, and predicted that the next decade would "bring a demand for at least some courses having a definite relation to the earning of a livelihood." In the meantime, he believed that a secretarial course and social science work would be appropriate for women students. 57