Failing Examinations

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30803, 15 July 1965, Page 14

Failing Examinations

When Mr D. W. Couch, a New Zealander now teaching in Canada, reported that up to 25 per cent of a class in British Columbia might be held back for another year’s work at the same level when they failed their examinations, parents and others accustomed to “ social promotion ” in this country may well have been surprised. It is now rare for a New Zealand child not to advance through primary and secondary school year by year. Failure in the School Certificate or University Entrance examinations, the first critical tests in his experience, is the only readily accepted reason for holding him back. Education authorities claim that any advantages in holding him back earlier are outweighed by the advantages of keeping him with his contemporaries as they progress through school. Perhaps this is one reason why failure in either of the two high school examinations carries with it an unfortunate and unwarranted stigma.

It is therefore interesting to hear from Mr Couch that British Columbian pupils “accept” failure in examinations and take it for granted that they should try again until they reach acceptable standards at each level. Most of them apparently benefit from the system and the discipline it imposes. New Zealand educationists might well consider whether our system of automatic promotion contributes to the fairly high failure rate at the end of high school and at the beginning of university studies. Would the results be better if candidates were withheld from the upper classes until they had mastered fundamentals? When it is recognised that abilities and rates of progress are bound to vary among children of the same age there need be no disgrace in spending an extra year in one class at any level This would seem a fruitful field for research.