VARSITY ENTRANCE

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 69, 14 December 1933, Page 13

VARSITY ENTRANCE

Examination Question A WRONG ATTITUDE “It is pleasing to note that fewer business men nowadays require that their juniors should have passed the entrance examination to an institution they never had the slightest intention of entering, although one still has occasional inquiries for boys who must have passed the University Entrance Examination and must be no more than 15 years of age,” said Mr. J. R. Sutcliffe, principal of Scots College, during t'he prize-giving ceremony last night, •'Doubtless there are many such boys available and I wish them fortune, .but the men who demand them are imposing a heavy burden on many schoolmasters and many boys. The University Calendar lays it down that the! entrance examination represents the reasonable result of four years’ work in a secondary school. This can only mean that the average boy should take four years, that some will require five, while -only the naturally brilliant boys will do i} in three.

“The result is that we schoolmasters are being continually pressed by parents to put their sons, brilliant or otherwise, through this examination in three years,” he said. “The university in its wisdom has decided that a fouryear course is necessary. The examipers, in setting the papers, take it for granted that this period of secondary . work has been carried out, and even if a boy can manage to scrape through in three years, or even two, he cannot, in most cases have reached that degree of cultural attainment visualised by the university authorities as requisite for those who are fitted, if they wish to do so, to. enter into university life. “The headmaster of one of the large secondary schools in one of our cities has told me that an average of more than a hundred guineas of examination fees are wasted annually by parents of his pupils who insist on their sons sitting for the University .Entrance Examination before the normal time.”