October 9, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



531 



students either. (3) He probably has, fre- 

 quently, in the same class both freshmen and 

 seniors taking together exactly the same course, 

 and then he can hardly be blamed for com- 

 paring their work, even though in the abstract 

 he ought not to compare it. If we want to 

 solve the problem, we have to free the teacher 

 who, usually, is incapable of freeing himself, 

 from these three influences. And that looks 

 like an almost hopeless problem. But, mean- 

 while, let us not forget that two thirds of the 

 lack of uniformity in grading among teachers 

 can be removed, and that this can be done 

 easily and simply by proper definitions of the 

 grades, for example, by those definitions which 

 we have used in Missouri. 



I have now practically said what I wanted 

 to say. If I continue, it is for the illustration 

 of special points rather than for the state- 

 ment of any additional principle. Let me 

 recall the remark that the tasks to be assigned 

 to seniors, or to members of both upper classes, 

 ought to approach in the requirement of ini- 

 tiative, of resourcefulness, of originality the 

 tasks which the research work of the graduate 

 school places upon its students. I here wish 

 to make it clear that the average college 

 teacher may be expected to offer stubborn re- 

 sistance to such a demand. For the illustra- 

 tion of the fact that the work assigned to 

 upper classmen generally approaches, in the 

 lack of any requirement of resourcefulness, 

 the work of the high school rather than that of 

 the graduate school, let me refer to data which, 

 at the first glance, seem to be unrelated to the 

 question, but which nevertheless illustrate it 

 well. I am thinking of the high marks ob- 

 tained by the women students in coeducational 

 institutions. In the University of Missouri we 

 find for the first semester 1912/13 the follow- 

 ing record: 



I suppose that the purpose of college train- 

 ing is to prepare students to meet more pro- 

 ficiently all the varied demands which society 



later will make upon them, — as the common 

 phrase is, to make better men and better 

 women of them. According to the college 

 records one should expect that women rather 

 than men would be found to be the leaders of 

 human society. As a matter of fact there are 

 but few women among the leaders of mankind 

 even in this decade of this century. I recog- 

 nize, of course, that women are handicapped 

 by three conditions, by legal discriminations, 

 by the force of tradition, and especially by 

 the obstacles resulting from motherhood. iNo 

 one, however, would assert that, these obstacles 

 being removed, the women would surpass the 

 men in the leadership of society. There is, 

 then, something wrong in such college records 

 which bluntly state that college women are 

 better prepared for leadership in human life 

 than college men. What is wrong in these 

 records is obviously the result of the teachers 

 giving the wrong kind of a test. Instead of 

 testing the initiative which the student should 

 have been trained to put into action for the 

 solution of a certain kind of problems, the 

 teacher tests almost exclusively that kind of 

 accomplishment which depends on the degree 

 of faithfulness and regularity in the perform- 

 ance of assigned tasks. We need not be 

 astonished that the average teacher does not 

 and really can not give the former kind of test, 

 the test of " initiative put into action." Edu- 

 cational science is still so undeveloped that in 

 many subjects the teacher himself does not 

 know how to give such a test. And then — 

 he who tests initiative has to employ initia- 

 tive himself in the act of testing. That re- 

 quires an immensely greater effort on the part 

 of the teacher than to test, in the traditional 

 way, how faithfully the students have done 

 their assigned work, and so we can hardly 

 expect the teacher, already overworked, to put 

 himself under the strain resulting from a more 

 proper method of testing. 



The same conditions apply to the testing of 

 freshmen and seniors. The seniors, being 

 only one step removed from graduate students, 

 ought to possess a comparative degree of 

 initiative. But their - examinations are con- 

 ceived more like those of college freshmen 



