COMMENTS ON THE ''SACRIFICE OF EDUCATIONS 543 



Examination, like so many other things, is useful as long as it 

 is spontaneous, occasional, and simple. Its mischief begins when 

 it grows to be organized into a trade, and the be-all and end-all 

 of its own sphere. The less the student be " prepared," in the 

 technical sense, the better. The more free the examiner be to use 

 his own discretion with each examinee, the more likely he is to 

 judge him fairly. It was so once. All this is now changed in the 

 thirty or forty years since the examining mania set in. The myr- 

 iad examinations which now encompass human life have called 

 out an army of trained examiners who have reduced the business 

 to a complicated art as difficult and special as chess. Like chess- 

 playing, the art of examiner and examinee has been wondrously 

 developed by practice. The trained examinee has now learned to 

 play ten examination games blindfold. He can do with ease what 

 the most learned man of the old school could not do. Gibbon 

 would be plucked in the modern history school. Arthur Welles- 

 ley would never get into the army. And Burke would have got 

 low marks, through not apportioning his time to the various 

 questions in the paper, I seriously doubt if many of our great 

 scholars, our famous lawyers, historians, and men of science could 

 " floor " off-hand a high-class examination paper. They would not 

 put their knowledge in the sharp, smart, orderly, cocksure style 

 which so much delights the examiner. They would muddle the 

 relation of the shire-moot to the hundred-moot, or they would 

 forget the point in Smith vs. Jones, or they might differ from the 

 examining board as to the exact number of the isomeric amyl 

 alcohols now known. All this your trained examinee, well nursed 

 by thorough crammers, has at the tips of his fingers. He " floors " 

 his paper with instinctive knack — seeing at a glance how many 

 minutes he can give to this or that question, which question will 

 " pay " best — and trots out his surface information and his ten-day 

 memory in neat little pellets beautifully docketed off with 1, 2, 3, 

 (a) (/3) (7), the " five elements " of this, the '' seven periods " of this 

 movement, and the wonderful discovery (last month) of a new 

 reading by Prof. Wunderbar. 



Of course, all this does not take in the examiner. He knows 

 that the student does not know all this, that this is not the wealth 

 of the student's reading, or the product of the student's native 

 genius. But what can he do ? His task is to set questions, and 

 the student's task is to answer them. If the questions on paper 

 are answered right, cadit qucestio. The examiner's business is not 

 with what the student knows, but with how many questions he 

 can answer, and how many marks he can score. The examiner 

 may see that he is not examining the students so much as the 

 teachers, or perhaps the crammers. All that he can positively say 

 is, that the candidate has been brought to the post perfectly " fit." 



