Examiners Examined

When any Scholar is able to understand Tully . . . make and speake true Latine in Verse and Prose . . . decline perfectly the Paradigms of Nounes, and Verbes in the Greek tongue; let him then and not before be capable of admission into the Colledge.

Thus stood the earliest college entrance requirements set by Harvard College. Early examinations were oral. This procedure was not improved until 1845 when Horace Mann spurred the introduction of written examinations in Boston, whence they soon spread to all U. S. schools. In 1900 came another improvement when the College Entrance Examination Board was founded to give uniform examinations whose passage would admit students to all first-class colleges and universities. In the course of educational evolution, some advanced pedagogical theorists have now grown critical of this system, too. Last week they were pleased to find that their dissatisfaction had the attention of a Carnegie Foundation report.

Educational insurgents claim that College Board examinations not only fail to test individual intelligence but prove nothing because all marking systems are riddled with radical discrepancies due to the variations of mood and personality among examiners. Deciding to survey the broad question of "Examinations and Their Substitutes," the Carnegie Foundation inaugurated in 1931 an international inquiry, assigned Dr. Isaac Leon Kandel of Columbia's Teachers College as its U. S. investigator. Last week one section of Investigator Kandel's 175-page examination of examiners contained much salve for wounded Hunkers.

A geometry paper graded 33 by a College Board reader was referred to the committee on hopeless failures which rated it 67. College Board examiners are not alone in their capriciousness. A history paper scored 60 by University of Toronto examiners, minus 10 more points for misspelling, was copied over without the misspellings, scored 70 on the rereading. In a one-year course at Cornell, the same students got widely different marks from the two instructors who taught in successive semesters. In an experiment at the University of Wisconsin the same teachers gave different marks when they regraded their own papers without knowledge of their former ratings.

His study of a comparison of entrance grades with subsequent records in Columbia University, initiated 30 years ago, prompted famed Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike to declare entrance examination estimates of future undergraduate success wrong 47 times out of 50 times. He judged the correlation between real student accomplishment and course ratings 60% as erroneous as if the examination marks had been assigned by lottery.

Wary of the educational anarchists who denounce any form of test as tending to prostitute pure mental development, Investigator Kandel noted in his report that recently many marking systems have been thoroughly overhauled and newer, more comprehensive essay-type examinations substituted for mere yes-&-no tests. Nevertheless, concluded he: "What is clear from the use of tests is that there is no single measure for predicting educational success."

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