ART OF EXAMINATION

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 75, 29 March 1930, Page 7

ART OF EXAMINATION

AXATOLE FRANCE'S TEST

(Copyright.)

The annual examinations at the Sorbonne have recently, ended. It was found that the majority-of those anxious for a bachelor, degree were foreigners, Poles and Eussians being in the lead. As happens every year around this time, the learned academictrained editors of tho Parisian papers, and all of them seem to be soaked in the classic in their youth, arc asking themselves and tho public whether those "bachot" exams are not really a mockery. How is it possible, they say, for the handful of examiners, with 10,000 candidates before them, to judge fairly in each case? What a young man or young woman may expect at the utmost at tho hands of the professional examiners is ten or fifteen minutes of questioning. Entiro careers depend on those ten minutes. A little nervousness on the part of the candidate, a little bad humour on the part of tho professor somo rainy morning after being jostled in a bus or underground railway carriage—and a career is wrecked and perhaps a life blasted. It will bo recalled that Anatole France was rejected himself when he tried for his "bachot." Yet that master ber came an immortal, in more than one sense. In later years Anatole Franco often mused upon that examination and the manner in which he failed. "If I were an examiner," he would say, "I would not ask any of those silly quostions out of books and atlases and geographies. I would study the young man's countenance. • Tho way ho looked, the manner in which he sat down, those are the things that I would observe to start with. Then I would begin an ordinary conversation with him, on tho weather, for instance. His reactions would interest me greatly. And all tho time I would bo saying to myself: 'Suppose I had a marriageable daughter, would I let this young man take l^er?' JThorefs the test.*-?