UNIVERSITY STANDARDS

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 281, 24 August 1944, Page 4

UNIVERSITY STANDARDS

Professor Rutherford, commenting on the history work of the first-year students of his department at Auckland University College, has passed strictures on the standard and quality of it that give cause for some concern. The results of the first-term tests and of the written work done during that term were easily the worst, he said, he had experienced in 11 years in Auckand, and he was led to the conclusion that there must be something radically wrong with a system of training in schools and with a system of matriculation that awarded passes to the type of students who occupied the bottom half of his History I class, a proportion of which, to the number of 43 out of a total of 147, “ought not to be attempting university work.” Some time ago, in comment in these columns on the subject of the new system of accrediting secondary school candidates for university entrance in substitution for the written external examination,, it was pointed out that a vigilant check on the part of the professorial boards would be necessary to ensure that first-year students filled the requirements essential for maintaining a high standard of university education. It is a waste of time and money, a drag on the university teachers, and a risk to the general standard of academic efficiency, to carry on degree courses with students whose work at the outset reveals that their competency is below the level of these requirements. According to Professor Fitt, chairman of the Auckland University College Professorial Board, there exists some diffidence on the part of the teaching staff in regard to exercising the right of excluding unsatisfactory students at the end of the first term. The other alternatives were to provide special courses, to insist on proper standards, and to refuse to devote much time to such students, who would have to seek extra assistance outside the college. These alternatives, however, do not appear to meet the fundamental question of fitness for a university career, which should be determined in the leaving year of the secondary school stage and checked up by the work done in the first-year term at the University. That check should be final and decisive.