College Exams Abolished 1921

ABOLISHING COLLEGE EXAMS

A NEW TERROR may await the fearsome student instead of the bed of roses that the removal of the examination test promises. Just what the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania may propose as a substitute for the “mid-years” and “finals” that they have announced abolished will be awaited with interest by academic authorities all over the country. “Examinations were introduced, not for the purpose of instruction,” says the Boston Daily Globe, “but to drive the worst laggards out of town,” and “the device has attained a certain moderate success.” Thus:

“Biennially a batch of exceptionally stupid youths is ejected from the lower classes. But it is amazing to what an extent the examinations have failed to get rid of many who have no intellectual right to share in the benefits of educational foundations.

“The system inevitably tends to encourage the student to give back to the examiner what the examiner wants. The word is passed around that a certain professor is ‘hipped’ on this or that point, and the student in his hour of trial frames his answers to suit the man who reads the papers.

“Oral instruction is a poor way in which to impart facts, for facts may be acquired much better from books. The lecturer, when successful, stimulates the minds of those who sit in front of him. But if students are worrying at an impending examination, instead of thinking about the subject, it is difficult for any teacher, however brilliant, to set their minds in motion.

“The examination system has no more friends than has a detective bureau. That is what it really is, a device to entrap the unworthy. To those students who hunger and thirst after knowledge it contributes nothing.

“A very large proportion of the academic authorities are ready to drop the examination, if only they can be shown some means by which the college can be protected from permanent occupation by the barbarians. There is rejoicing on professors’ row at the bold step taken by the Wharton School. At the same time there is much curiosity as to what a faculty does after it slams the door on examinations.”

It is a patent fact that for a number of years the worth of examinations has been “doubted by many educational specialists, by parents, and by students who are in a position to understand just how little an examiner can tell concerning the attainments of the examined.” Historically considered, the argument in favor of examinations has its weaknesses, as this writer proceeds to show:

“The intellectual life managed to carry on for many centuries before examinations were invented.Â Â Teaching was highly successful in ancient Greece, altho the instructors simply lectured to such searchers after knowledge as appeared. If a student found the course beyond his depth he stopt attending and went home. The Greeks had also a certain advantage in that their centers of education were not obliged to attempt to make scholars out of students who were there for non-scholarly reasons.

“The Greek cities saved their learned men a lot of complications by taking over the conduct of athletics. The runner in the Marathon competed, not for the famous school which met under the shadow of the Acropolis, but for his city. And in Greece a university education was not considered of importance for a bond salesman.”

Source: The Literary Digest for December 3, 1921

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