COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS. 53 



COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS. 



By ABRAHAM FLEXNER, 



LOUISVILLE, KY. 



OF all the influences molding secondary education in the United 

 States at the present time, among the most powerful are the 

 college entrance examinations. To the schoolmaster they seem to 

 embody in tangible form the object of his efforts; to the student they 

 form a barrier that must be cleared, interposed as they are between 

 him and that fascinating interplay of social, athletic and perhaps 

 scholarly activities, called college life. It becomes, therefore, a ques- 

 tion of immediate and pressing importance — what conception of edu- 

 cation do these examinations tend, perhaps unconsciously, to establish? 

 In scholarship tests they yield a result that is treated as abso- 

 lute; no consideration suggested by the development or individual 

 history of the student is suffered to modify or illumine their ver- 

 dict. The ignorance and the impartiality of the examining author- 

 ity compel the rejection of all factors except the visible question 

 and its answer. But in the secondary school period neither knowl- 

 edge nor the rehandling of knowledge can, save at the peril of 

 growth, be regarded as the sole or main educational end. The 

 accumulation of facts, the mastery of tools must be subsidiary 

 to the inward ordering of the pupil. While this work of organiza- 

 tion must proceed side by side with, indeed largely by means of, 

 the acquisition of knowledge, the two processes do not form an equa- 

 tion. In a word, definite quantitative, even definite qualitative 

 performances in certain limited areas of knowledge can not be 

 immediately translated into mental and moral terms. A limited 

 acquaintance ■with, certain predetermined selections from Greek, Latin 

 and English literatures may or may not connote the concentration, 

 energy and power of resistance which genuine training should confer; 

 there is no necessary or inevitable connection between them. What 

 we want is a method for measuring energy, growth, organization. An 

 examination, therefore, which seeks not only to value past effort, but 

 to decide the very possibility of future opportunity simply upon the 

 basis of a uniform scholarship test, emphasizes scholarship, such as it 

 is, at the expense of organization. It tends inevitably to produce a 

 special, narrow fitness for meeting a particular form of test at the cost 

 of spiritual spontaneity, and, in consequence, the verdict of the schools 

 is usually upset by the verdict of subsequent experience. 



