VALUE OF SCHOLASTIC EXAMINATIONS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 153, 16 July 1937, Page 4

VALUE OF SCHOLASTIC EXAMINATIONS

With the New Education Fellowship now in conference at Auckland, we are hearing a good deal about the value of school and university examiuations. As reported a day or two back, Dr. Wiiliam Boyd, head of the Department of Education at Glasgow University, was one of the most prominent speakers on the subject. In his view the value placed upon the result of such examinations has in the past been very much over-estimated. Up to a point, he said, examinations were heljfful, but they had been badly overdone. The problem was to find some way of making use of the valuable aspects of examinations and of getting rid of . their attendant evils. They could Play quite an import^nt part in educational processes and were a guarantee against slackness and for efficiency from the point of view of the public. Their selective function was also useful, but there were reasons why errors entered into the examination method of measuring efficiency, If a teacher has to think in terms of inspectors and examinations, he will be afraid to experiment, while a seoond ill-effect lies in the tendency to establish wrong standards and methods of selection. Dr. Eoyd's conclusion is that the examination system "brings abont a paralysis of initiative in the case of both teacher and pupil" and that examinations should be\confined to what he terms the "mechanical elements of human intelligence," such as memory and the capacity to absorb the ideas of other people. Only a few days earlier the same topic was being discussed by Mr. W. T. Charge, chairman of the Commercial Education Committee of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce, who opens by saying that "no one should be so dogmatic as to say that some form of testing for individual scholastic attainments could be dispensed with altogether." Ou the other hand, however, he declares that it is becoming in~ creasingly evident to the more thoughtful that studying anything merely for examination purposes is going at a thing in the wrong way. The traditional examination of the academie type does not measure the understanding or intelligence of an individual. I» fact, no one masters anything until he has practised jt; he does not know his capabilities until he haS tried himself out in a large way and proved himself. By learning through worthwhile experience to meet actual conditions, and thus developing a strong sense of responsibility in the performance of his duties, an individual develops a capacity for satisfactory work which is nqver acquired through purely academic study. In the final analysis, no one ever really learns anything that he does not see a need for at the time of learning. Scholastic learning, or academic education, merely prepares for the acquisition of future wisdom in the world of actualities. The active-minded, experienced individual who has learned to rely upon himself by doing his own thinking, really does the best work in life. Most of the elder among us will probably agree with the Sydney writer wben he says.that many boys and girls probably never learn how to study; how to think and work to a purpose. They pften do learn how to take examinations, . because they have developed good memories. At the same time many successful examinees often display a complete lack of judgment because they have merely been exposed to the ideas of authorities whom they have been taught never to question, instead of being taught how to do their own thinking on a subject. Beyond this, many successful examinees, in thus showing theroselves superior to others, become obsessed by a feeling of self-satisfactipn that stands badly in the way of their gojng on to develop their own thinking faculties along useful lines. Speaking, of course, of Australian conditions, which are probably not much different from our own, the Sydney writer says that "our children are being subjected to multitudinous experimenst in edtcation that have little, if any, scientific or clearly defined purposes." There is thus a danger that the mipds of the children are being benumbed with an everincreasing avalanche of technical facts, and they are being graded generally according to their encyclopedic information in examinations. "Should we not rather,' 9 he asks, "encourage our schools to educate the mind for understanding that will last a lifetime instead of giving information that will be forgotten to-morrow ? What we seem to need is the development of a method by which children can be graded according to their capacity. One should think that everyone would strive for and weleome the appearance of a Practical guide to even approximate individual capacity. The present difficulty appears to be to find some such method, but it ouglit not to be impossible to approximate one. All life is an experiment anyway, and all results merely approximations where the variable human being is a facfcor. Examinations, in the main, test knowledge, not .capacity Fin fact, they often actually work against the capable candidate who has only his own subject and takes his own view of it, and work in favour of the mere memoriser who can parrot all the text-books on any subject."