4oo 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



As a matter of fact, college students are a selected group. 4 If the 

 surface A (Fig. 9) represents the distribution of all elementary school 

 pupils at a given time, then most of those pupils who are to go to 

 college fall in the upper end of that surface. If our colleges took the 

 best students and only the best, if they made a clean cut off the top, 

 then the distribution of their abilities would be represented by a sur- 

 face closely approximating EFG of surface A. But for various reasons 

 — including our extremely inaccurate means of attempting to deter- 

 mine fitness for entrance — our colleges do not admit merely those who 

 are best fitted to pursue higher study, that is, the upper end of the 



surface. Some pupils find ways into college who occupy stations in the 

 surface not far above the median ; or the line of mediocre ability. This 

 is clearly shown in Professor Dearborn's study of the relative standing 

 in scholarship of students in high school and in college. Consequently 

 the lower end of the surface would not be clean-cut as in EFG, but 

 rather like the heavy line of Fig. 10. It would, of course, be skewed 

 positively, for there could not possibly be many cases near G. Most of 

 them would have to fall in the larger space near EF. The curve would 

 be similar to that for incomes. The heavy line in Fig. 10, therefore, 

 though not representing with precision 5 the scientifically correct distri- 



* Thorndike, E. L., " The Selective Influence of the College," Educational 

 Review, 30, 1. 



6 " The curve of probability gives us the only precise meaning of the term 

 ' scientific knowledge.' We have seen that human observations and measure- 

 ments are never precisely accurate. Generalizations, in like manner, are never 

 precisely true. The formulation of a law of nature can never be made absolutely 

 exact. Scientific knowledge, therefore, is not that absolutely exact and certain 

 knowledge which the popular mind assumes it to be. It is certainty or exact- 

 ness within a range of error, and to diminish that range is the object of scien- 

 tific endeavor." Giddings, F. H., " Sociology," Columbia University Press, New 

 York, 1908, p. 24. 



