ENTRANCE TO UNIVERSITY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27211, 1 December 1953, Page 13

ENTRANCE TO UNIVERSITY

PRACTICES OVERSEAS DR. HULME REPORTS TO COLLEGE COUNCIL Conditions of entrance to the university, advisory services for students, and a wider kind of general education were investigated in many colleges of the United States and the United Kingdom by Dr, H. R. Hulme, Rector of Canterbury University College, on his recent trip overseas. Reporting to the college council yesterday he itemised practices at each university, but also made some general observations. “The problems of admission and selection of students are verjr much to the fore in many universities,” Dr. Hulme said. “It is pf particular interest to New Zealand because the accrediting system has been under discussion recently, and whilst it has been strongly criticised by many, no solution to the problem of admission has yet been put forward which meets the views of a substantial majority. The University of New Zealand is sometimes criticised •on the ground that it admits many people who should not enter a university at all. The high failure rate in the first year is quoted against us and there is often a tacit assumption that if we made our entrance examinations stiffer, the failure rate would be substantially decreased. It is difficult to convince people that with present selection methods, if the failure rate is to be reduced appreciably, then the numbers admitted will have to be considerably reduced. This was shown conclusively for the old university examinations by the work of Thomas, Beeby and Oram. What is required is a more efficient method of selecting students whether or not there is a raising of standards.” Tests and Reports Many American universities used the College Entrance Board, a nonprofit making concern, which served a large number of universities. The examinations held by this board were of the objective type and the scores of candidates, after standardisation, were supplied to the colleges concerned. “Statistics show that the most reliable forecast of a candidate’s future success can be got by combining together the results of the objective tests with a report on the candidate’s grading in his last year at school,” Dr Hulme said. “The school report shows up as being rather more reliable on the average than any kind of entrance examination, but a combination of the two is definitely better than either taken separately. It should be noted that this differs from our system of accrediting in two ways: first, a uniform examination is given to all candidates, and second the school gradings are supplied to the university, which takes the final decision on admission.” English universities were, in .general, such smaller than the American universities and the problems of admission were treated much more personally In general admission was based on the results of a higher leaving certificate, together with headmasters’ reports and in most cases interviews. One interesting fact was the tendency to try to standardise the form of report by a headmaster. Dr. Hulme said. “I found that in America the problem of testing was frequently linked with student counselling,” he continued. “The reason of course is not far to seek because most counselling arises out of failure in examinations, or general inability to cope with a university life. Because of this, and because we in Canterbury have recently started a system of tutors in two of the faculties, I thought it worth while to look into the tutorial and counselling or guidance systems used in the various universities I visited.” Practices were quoted. “General Education” “Over a period of years Canterbury University College has been interested in what is usually called ‘general education,’” Dr. Hulme said. “Different universities in America have different approaches to the problem of giving their students a liberal education before they start to specialise on their professional subjects, and a great deal has been written about these various approaches, but no-one can visit a university such as Chicago without realising how serious is the attempt to devise some scheme of general education to counteract the ever-increas-ing specialisation during the later stages.

In England the university courses are in general more specialised and along traditional lines. There is, however. one interesting experiment being carried out at the new University College of North Staffordshire. The essence of the scheme is that all students do a common first year, the object of which is to give a general setting for the more specialised studies to be followed during the next three years. The general impression I gained was one of reasonable satisfaction with the way things were working out, but that, as in all new departures, certain difficulties had yet to be faced.”