284 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts , and Letters. 
Regarding entrance: nine schools admit at five years of age; 
ten schools at five and one-half years or if six by Christmas or 
the end of the first semester. All others admit at six. Or to 
state it more simply: thirty-one admit at six and twenty-one 
at less than six years of age. The average entering age, then, 
of each child, if he entered at his earliest opportunity, would 
be considerably less than six years. We have, however, reck¬ 
oned the entering age at six, giving the schools, as systems, the 
benefit of the doubt. And it might further be said that in all 
computations of percentages of children who are advanced, 
normal, or retarded the small fractions of percentages have 
been arbitararily assigned to the column headed ‘normal/ again 
giving the doubt to the schools. 
The claim is frequently made that many children enter 
school at an age greater than the minimum allowed by law. 
In the schools reporting there were 2,691 children in the first 
grade. How many were repeaters, unfortunately I do not 
know, hut only 441 were above six years of age when then en¬ 
tered. From another investigation I ascertained that the aver¬ 
age per cent age of repeaters was 7.4. Assuming that to hold 
true for the first grade, then the number of repeaters among 
the 2,691 first grade children we are studying, would he 199, 
leaving 2,492 as the estimated number who entered for the first 
time into the first grade. The 441 over-age children at en¬ 
trance would he 17.6% of this number while the 207 who en¬ 
tered before they were six would he 8.3% leaving as the net 
percentage who were over-age at entrance as 9.3. To further 
overcome this figure we must remember that many children 
who are nearly six are entered as being six by anxious parents, 
and they remain on the records as being slightly older all the 
time, than they really are. Also offset by the “on trial” and 
second year promotions. 
[Next, considering the standard required for passing from one 
grade to another we find surprising uniformity in the face of 
the fact that in Minnesota each school system is at liberty to 
fix its own requirements in these respects. In the grades be¬ 
low the high school, six schools promote on a basis of 70%, 
