EXAMINATION SYSTEM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 226, 23 September 1936, Page 6

EXAMINATION SYSTEM.

PSYCHOLOGISTS' ATTACK. Another attack on the school examination system came from psychologists at the international conference of the New Education Fellowship at Cheltenham, England. Dr. R. B. Cattell, director of the Leicester School Psychological Service, said that teachers the ordinary type of examination, parents deplored it, and children suffered from it, yet they had so far failed to replace it by any successful substitute. The marking of essay papers, for instance, had been shown to -be criminally unreliable. "The gross unreliability of the ordinary type of examination has been known for a long time to educators. I like to remember the° case of the American examiner, one of four in a university, who for his own convenience wrote a model answer, which accidentally got included with the scripts sent to the other examiners, all three of whom failed him. Probably the dictating of the curriculum and the narrowing of the conception of education are the worst features of examinations.

"The solution to which we must come is a conception of the examination as a test, as a diagnostic interlude purely incidental to the main course of education. No ' doctor claims to improve examinees' breathing by the use of the stethoscope. Methods of examination may occasionally do damage—entirely temporary and trivial damage—to the function tested." Speaking of casualties of the examination system, Miss Simmins, of the Institute of Psychology, said: "Some of the most distressing cases "l see and test are young men and some middle-aged ones whose entire lives have been spoiled because their whole school life was spent in unavailing efforts to reach a particular examination standard. I have oases in mind of boys who went through school always depressed and discouraged, who left school already feeling that they weTe failures in life, and who many years later fell into the hands of the psychiatrists and psychologists, having not been able to make anything of their lives." Miss Simmins said that psychologists were now able to assess the intelligence and capacity of a child at a very early age and to forecast what ho would be "able to do in school years or later. . Sir Philip Hartog said: "I am not one of those who are opposed in principle to examinations. I believe that for many things they are essential, and that on that account wo ought to do our best to test them, to find out their weaknesses and remedy those weaknesses."