During his first term, he was required to receive a grade of 60 to remain in the school. Although he only achieved a 59.2 after completing his final exams, he was permitted to remain because of his "recent progress." Older than the other students in his class, he often spoke out against their use of alcohol. In his final year he took courses in metallurgy, ore analysis and assaying, and participated in a research project developing razors. His graduation thesis was entitled "The effects of Tungsten on Iron and Steel". It laid out the basic principles of what would later become his two greatest advances in metallurgy. Haynes spent many hours in the institute's laboratory working with tungsten and other metals before graduating in 1881; he was fourteenth out of twenty-one graduates—twenty did not pass.