80 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



amined until the end of the two years of Ms honors 

 course. On examination, he is warned not to attempt to 

 answer all questions in a second-rate manner, but as 

 many as he can in a first-rate manner. ''The honors 

 student," we are told by President Aydelotte, "cannot 

 profitably be taught by the same methods as the ordin- 

 ary man. He will not need the same careful day to day 

 assignments, the same weekly and monthly tests, or the 

 same requirements for attendance at classes. A part of 

 the value of his work will come from the independence 

 and initiative which are cultivated in the doing of it. He 

 should be given larger tasks and longer time in which 

 to do them. If he has individual instruction it should 

 be in the nature of help in the difficulties which he, the 

 student, has encountered; he should take the responsi- 

 bility for his success and should be allowed to face 

 squarely the task of working out his own intellectual sal- 

 vation. Classes and lectures should exist for the benefit 

 of the honor student, not the student for the benefit of 

 the classes. He should enjoy as much freedom as can 

 practicably be allowed in the matter of attendance at lec- 

 tures and in the methods by which he will work." 



A third means to this end is the Selective Admission 

 plans, notably Columbia's experiment with entrance 

 mental tests as supplemental to the older Regents, Col- 

 lege Entrance Board, and High School Records. Pro- 

 fessor Coss of Columbia stresses our inability to meas- 

 ure adequately for classification mental capacity, until 

 we more adequately define the thing to be measured. As 

 it stands, he believes that mental tests have three times 

 the relative efficiency of high school records in deter- 

 mining promise of success in college. Nowhere are we 

 pinning our faith on I. Q. 's, as they may limit educabil- 

 ity or classify too strictly mental calibre, but certainly 

 there are many applicants who should never enter col- 

 lege, and yet the problem is not so much one of elimina- 

 tion of misfits or discovery of ' ' sheer brains " as it is the 

 discovery of the best means of firing our students with 

 enthusiasm for creative scholarship. 



