To evaluate the effectiveness of a traditional college English program, 100 incoming freshmen (Group A) were requested to postpone freshman English to their sophomore year; another 100 (Group B) were asked to postpone the first term to their sophomore year; another 100 (Group C) were asked to postpone their second term to the sophomore year; and another 100 (Group D) were asked to postpone their third term with the remainder of the freshmen (approximately 600) following the normal sequence. All assignments to experimental groups were randomly made. At the end of the academic year, 244 randomly selected subjects were administered a written proficiency examination, the Brown-Carlson Listening Test, the Iowa Reading test and a language-knowledge test devised by the staff. The data collected were subjected to analysis of variance. Results were: (1) Those students who had not taken the units on the language-knowledge part of the sequence scored low on the test devised to test this material; (2) No differences were noted between the experimental and control groups on the other measures applied; and (3) Women did better than men on all tests. It was concluded that the philosophy, content, and teaching methods of the freshman English sequence need to be reexamined and reevaluated. (Author/CK)