“RUINED LIVES”

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 304, 19 September 1936, Page 28

“RUINED LIVES”

Casualties of Examinations OTHER TESTS URGED \ ' • ' ■ '! ■ - . Another attack on the school examination system came from psychologists at the International Conference of the New Education Fellowship recently. ' They spoke of lives ruined by examinations, and asked for tests of capacity at an early age. Teachers, said Dr. R. B. Cattell, Director of the Leicester School Psychological Service, ridiculed the ordinary type of examination, parents deplored, it, and children, suffered from It; yet so far it had not been found possible to replace it by any successful, substitute. The marking of essay papers, for instance, had been shown to be criminally unreliable. ■ ■ 1 ■ The Failed Examiner.

Dr. Cattell added: “When I think of the inquiries about examinations 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. • z '' ’ -

“The gross unfeUabllity of. the ordinary type of examination ha 3 been known for a long time to educators. 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 exam ination system,” Miss Simmins, of the Institute of Psychology, said: “Some of the most distressing cases I 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 ef“orts to reach a particular examination standard. “I have cases in mind of boys who went through, school always depressed and discouraged, who left school already feeling that they were failures In life, and, many years later, had to be treated by psychiatrists and psychologists, not having been able to make anything of their lives.” . Psychologists, said Miss Simmins, were now able to assess the intelligence and capacity of a child at a very early age, and to forecast what he would be able to do in school years or later.