THE ACTION OF EXA1VIINATIONS.* IT was high time to have
a book about Competitive Examinations, written by one well acquainted with their working. We have had forty years' experience of them at Universities—we count from the regulations of 1837 as to the Cambridge Tripos—and we have seen them in operation for about twenty years in the Civil Service. They are the mainstay of all modern education. If their ultimate
*71c Action of Examinatione. By Ileary Latham, Mat. Cambridge: Delgtaton, Bud Co. effect is bad or indifferent, the sooner this is owned the better ; and if, as the majority of people would say, we have not dis- covered the exact limits within which examinations are service- able, we are likely to be guided towards this knowledge by a thoughtful consideration of the whole subject by a man who has set scores of papers, examined hundreds of competitors, and who has not made his business a mere fetich. In every point of view, Mr. Lathatn's book was wanted. Mr. Todhunter's Conflict of Studies discussed nooks of the subject. The evidence laid before the University Commission by Mr. Hopkin and Professor Stokes forms a valuable philosophical disquisition on the effects of examinations. But we wanted the endless fragmentary discus- sions focused, so to speak. We wanted some one to fairly sum up the evidence adduced in all the controversies which break out every two or three months about the physique or manners of the Competition Wallahs, the future of the bright boys who make marks and win prizes, the hard fate of their dull cousins, who can follow the bounds over an Irish county, and yet are kept out, for their loose spelling, of their proper place in a crack regiment, which
was never particularly noted for spelling. Mr. Latham has laboured to do all this, and more, and we recommend not merely college dons, but statesmen who are forced to talk about Univer- sity reform, and parents with heaps of boys on their hands, to study the book. It will help them to arrive at correct solutions of practical problems which they must solve somehow. It will weed out a few prejudices against examinations, tone down some wild dreams as to their universal applicability, and enable a father to direct Tom or Harry's scholastic career with some intelligence.
Mr. Latham assumes the ermine and poses as a Judge, but he is an advocate, after all, we fear, so far as the effects of purely competi- tive examinations are concerned. He unconsciously takes up the hostile attitude natural to a College tutor or University examiner who believes much in the benefit of residence, towards such exami- nations as those conducted by the University of London or the Civil Service Commissioners. His way of putting the case against those examinations is plausible, and may be stated thus : —The man who goes to Mr. Wren to be " coached " for the Indian examinations has no time to be educated ; he must be "crammed," It would be a waste of time to try to exercise and develop his judgment, to teach him to reason, to correct faults of temperament, or to inculcate wholesome intellectual habits. The tutor who knows he trade must try to fill his pupil's mind with a mass of details which will pay on the examination day, and which will be forgotten a week or two after. He must not stray a foot beyond the ordinary path, or he will be met by the just remonstrance of his pupil, "that does not come in." There is no time for thinking ; that will assuredly not pay, when a young man has only a few months for his Indian or Army "exam." What the tutor must be satisfied with is the acquisition of a certain mechanical knowledge of a subject, and a successful study of the art of making a little knowledge go a long way. The bulk of examinations are really only tests of what Mr. Latham calls the Portative Memory, as distinguished from the Analytical Memory. That being his view, be thinks we must remodel the style of examinations, if we are to make them tests of merit. We must set a premium on all sorts of knowledge which can be acquired only slowly,—by assimilation, instead of mechanical reception. We must give the preference to studies which teach an art or the capacity to do something. These studies do not readily admit of "cram," and they have the further advantage that when once acquired they are not readily forgotten. Now, we do not so much dispute the truth of all this, as we deny that it is the whole truth, and that Mr. Latham has really summed up fairly the entire case. We do not think that lie takes enough account of the worldly wisdom implied in success in examinations, of the kind which he dislikes. The notion that it is the mere bookworm—or the person, as Mr. Latham con- temptuously styles him, " with some little power of acquiring" —who does best, and that the practical genius is nowhere, in these struggles, is quite wide of the mark. Worldly shrewdness goes for much,—only too much, in an examination room. The man who has his wits about him, and who presumably would act prudently in any emergency, falls to work, when he unfolds the paper, on the questions which he knows he can answer, instead of wasting time over those about which he is uncertain. He does not loiter over one question, to the exclusion or injury of his answers to others. His reading has been concentrated ; it is accurate, so far as it goes ; he has probably studied the examiners as well as the subjects ; and—here we come to the bad side of the matter—he will be sure to be crammed with information about Hegelianism, if the examiner is known to be a Hegelian, and to talk Senn- tionalism, if he is of that way of thinking. It is not pleasant to see a lad "writing up "to an examiner, and we do not mention it as an advantageous incident of the present system of examina- tions. It is, however, not the less the case that success in them generally implies a certain degree of worldly wisdom and tact which will be of service to their possessor in any calling. We should like, too, Mr. Latham to have acknowledged more• heartily than he has done the value of the discipline to which a lad preparing for an examination—be he a pupil of Mr. Wren, reading for the Indian Civil Service, or of Mr. Routh, reading for the Mathematical Tripos—must submit. Both kinds of discipline imply regular habits, self-denial, avoidance of dissipation, concentration of purpose, and a clear dis- tinction between knowledge and what the carnal man con- founds with it,—hazy impressions and loose, vague ideas, such as are to be picked up from a newspaper in a railway journey. Only think what would be the state of the minds of young people in these days of universal reading, light literature, and temptations to smatterers, if competitive examinations did not mow down in youth all that was partial or inaccurate, Only try to measure their benefit in raising the standard of accuracy. Dr. Newman has said that "if he had to choose between a so-called University which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years, and then sent them away, as the University of Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since," he would give the preference to "that University which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun." But he explains this paradox when he says that he holds of small account the acquisition of a load of undigested knowledge, and the superficial acquaintance with the sciences which periodical literature and occasional lectures diffuse ; and what better check is there on that "smatter- ing of a hundred things" than the ordeal of the examination-room ? We are not idolators of examinations, which are, after all, only irregularly-woven nets, with holes of many sizes, sometimes letting the best fish slip through, and securing the indifferent and the medi- ocre. They have their bad sides, even as the ordeals which they replaced at the Universities, disputations, had. Prolonged exclu- sive attention to the latter produced a sort of useless sharpness and frivolous dexterity of wits, and led to the neglect at the ancient Universities of studies which could not readily be made the sub- ject of public debate, and a similar evil would be sure to appear if examinations were all in all. As to one drawback Mr. Latham speaks with great and, we think, just confidence. He is sure that too many examinations are pernicious. A succession of small efforts leaves the mind, as he puts it, like an india- rubber band which has been too often stretched. The canvassing of vacancies and probable competitors, the talk about marks and examiners' weaknesses, is not elevating, and we decidedly think that Mr. Latham is right in his notion that a young man should have done with his examinations by twenty- three. What we would merely insist upon is that the benefits of examinations far exceed their disadvantages ; that they are the antidotes to prominent evils of these times ; that they are not bad semblances of the real struggle of life ; and that no reaction in favour of what Mr. Latham terms, not ironically, "a genial edu- cation," will succeed in ousting them. We know it is a growing fashion to depreciate their worth. But can Mr, Matthew Arnold, and the many who ridicule the notion of our copying China or Austria, tell us of any system as a substitute which will waken up the idle and sift out the smatterers ?
In regard to the art of marking, Mr. Latham makes many good observations, pointing out the weakness and shortcomings of several systems in use. But it does not appear to us that he deals sufficiently with one cardinal defect. Every examiner gives marks for accurate answers ; he refuses marks for what is not answered accurately. But that is not all,—there ought to be some mode of estimating the nature of the errors actually committed. When a man gives an intelligent but inaccurate answer to a question set in history he cannot get any marks, but he ought not to stand in the same position as another whose answers are at once inaccurate and unintelligent. There are degrees in blundering, and a good system of marking ought to register them. The simplest method would be to employ minus marks. Were this used, it would operate as a check on mechanical " cram ;" in no way is knowledge which is the result of hurried absorption more easily detected than by the quality of the blunders. On this head Mr. Latham makes one suggestion which appears to be useful, He thinks that especial
pains should be taken to reward high excellence, to the discour- agement of smatterers. The plan adopted in the Indian Civil Service examinations of deducting a fixed number of marks partly answers this end,
Mr. Latham, who stands up for the benefits of a University training, does not think much of Lord Salisbury's plan for in- ducing selected candidates for the Civil Service to resort to a University. They will be isolated from the rest of their fellows' while they are engaged with their Oriental studies. They will not gain "social advantages" if they are sent specially to look for them, and Mr. Latham's idea is that it would be preferable, to place them at the age of seventeen or eighteen at the University, so that they might reside there for a year or two, aiming at the class in the annual examination which would enable them to compete for selection.
On the whole, Mr. Latham's book—though clumsy, full of repe- titions, and marked by the schoolmaster's love of common-places—is, highly useful. It would have been much more so, indeed, had it been full and frank in its criticism of Examiners. We should have liked to see one chapter on "The Vanity of Examiners," illustrating the Mis- chievous habit of setting questions to display the knowledge and originality of the examiner ; another on "Examiners' Arrogance,' illustrated by references to those who draw all their questions' from their own books ; and a third dealing with " Obscure Ques- tions." The last is a point of much consequence. We have known an examiner who could not utter a plain sentence puzzle nearly a score of well-read students in an oral examination by a simple question relative to the Statute of Frauds, and who, the moment he managed to explain himself, was answered satisfactorily by every one. This story every student could cap.
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