HORAE SCHOLASTICAE

In days when a university was a place of learning rather than of teaching those words had a sublime signifleance. The hours of scholarship, were in retrospect at least, silver with thoughtful speech and golden with silent thinking. But the Spirit of the Hour under whose dreadful rule Harvard now swears and sweats by turns is of a very different nature, with a more malign influence.

The College rules prescribe that by certain dates in November and April every instructor shall submit to the office the grades of the men in his course. If the course is one in which there is, throughout the half year, a series of tests or papers, the grade will be but an average of those to date. If it is one in which; through conviction or inclination, the instructor gives no tests additional to the mid-year and final examinations, hour examinations become necessary in order to produce what is required. And the fruit is generally as good as the plant. As a farmer might (but doesn't) put it: "Quickly sowed, quickly growed." It is in courses such as the latter that one hears the familiar apology: "I don't like to give you an hour examination, but the Office requires it."

As a matter of fact, all the Office requires is a grade. It is only the nature of the course, or the laziness of the instructor that makes this grade depend on one short test. Certainly it is not the best interests of education that demand it.

The requirement of the Office is, in turn, the result of the conception that the student must be "jacked up," and the grades offer bases for disciplinary action. But to form a correct opinion of a student's merits from his grade on an hour examination is scarcely possible. The good student may have momentarily neglected the short period covered in his attention to another similar period, or to the whole matter of the course. The poor student may have found local difficulties which would have disappeared later. The judgment of an "hour exam" is but a "snap" judgment.

It is true that there are courses in which the subject matter can best be learned period by period. In such frequent tests have their value, either as signposts to the goal or as steps up the grade. It is true that there are students anxious to "check-up on themselves" every so often. In such courses tests and even hour examinations are of course at the option of the instructor. For such students optional tests might be advisable.

But neither in the interests of instructor, student, fair discipline, nor education can the present hour examinations be supported. Their only justification is in the cases of "doubtful" Freshmen and more than "doubtful" upperclassmen. In these two cases they might--after sufficient warning--be made bases for action. In any others they serve but to pile up work at University Hall, to swell the budgets of tutoring schools, and fatally to emphasize the mechanical side of education.--"Horidae Scholasticae".