EVILS OF COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS.

FOR several years past education has been a leading subject of discussion; thrust out of its place now and then by a war or a treaty, but always coming again to the front when the superseding excitement has subsided. By this time, it might be thought, every question connected with education ought to be settled, and the whole subject exhausted; but, so far from this being the case, a great deal has been unsettled, and what has been already done requires a great deal more to complete it. Old systems have been broken up, and order has not yet been elicited from their elements.

The great motive power by which recent changes have been effected is the action of Government: which, till of late years, exercised no influence on education, except through universities and other learned bodies, whose degrees or other testimonials were essential to certain offices. Now, however, Government acts directly on elementary education, and indirectly on higher education. In the former, it has created a system of great magnitude, administered by a class of teachers called forth by it. On the latter, it has acted by creating standards as qualifications for various offices in its gift. The great engine by which it works is examination, which is of two kinds, high pressure or competitive, and low pressure or qualifying. The development of this engine in power has been one of the most remarkable features of our time. It began, no doubt, as a humble attendant on teaching, to test the soundness of the instruction and the diligence of the disciple, but it has grown to giving laws both to the teacher and the taught. There can be little doubt that Cambridge was the scene of its first departure from its original humble functions. There, about the middle of the last century, the system of competition for mathematical honours began. The competition, however, at first, was not by examination as at present conducted, but by disputation in the schools, a method the memory of which survives in the names Wrangler' and 'Moderator.' By degrees, however, questions to be solved on paper were introduced, and gradually superseded the disputations; which, being reduced to a mere form, were abolished in 1838. By this time the examination system had been applied to classics as well as mathematics, and, in fact, had

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become the chief factor in the distributing of all the prizes of the university and the sole dispenser of its testimonials. Examination, in fact, had developed into a power. It gave a stimulus of the strongest kind to study, and gave a character and direction to teaching. It enlisted ambition in the service of learning, and made students for love-not of knowledge but distinction. The benefit to learning was not unmixed. The crowd who flocked to the shrine were not all true worshippers; and the love of learning for its own sake was often overpowered in the few who had it, by the superior force of the secondary motive. Moreover, the teacher was subjected to the same influence as the student. He was tempted to teach, not in order that his pupil might know, but that he might get marks: not that his knowledge might be sound and deep, but that it might be producible on demand. And the teacher soon found that knowledge need not be deep or even sound in order to be readily producible, nay, even that thorough teaching was often pains thrown away for examination purposes. Hence originated 'cram'-i.e. teaching with a view to a specific examination alone, of various degrees of literary dishonesty, but in all cases aiming at passing off a counterfeit instead of real knowledge. Nor was this the only evil of the ascendency of examinations. The stimulus to learning, though powerful, was very unequal in its action. It urged the willing to work beyond their strength, to the injury of health and brain, but scarcely influenced the dull and idle at all, except when the ordeal was just impending. Thus its power was so distributed as to be too great in one case and too small in another. It killed or disabled promising students, but would only make dunces work by the imminence of disgrace. It thus proved to be an instrument of indisputable power, but with the very serious drawback that it could not be relied on to do the work that was wanted, while it was apt to do much that was not wanted and was positively mischievous. While, however, its use was restricted to the universities, its range was comparatively small, and the ease of its application made it popular with teachers, while the brilliancy of its results shut men's eyes to its failures and to the mischief which it was doing. Lists of successful candidates for honours supplied a tangible testimonial of efficiency; while no record appeared of brains or energy exhausted, of all the zest taken out of learning by its forced acquirement, of intellectual indigestion of knowledge acquired for distinction, but perfectly useless in after-life: effects to one or other of which it is due that the place in the honour list is often the last distinction acquired in life. And there was no list of those who had perished by the way, or had dropped out of the running, more or less damaged by the killing pace.

Things being so, it is not wonderful that the range of examinations should have been extended. The first great extension was, I believe, to the Indian Civil Service. That service was at the time

the most highly paid in the world, and, to men of enterprise, one of the most attractive. In it a young man began with an income much larger than the average income of clergymen, and might attain to the post of proconsul over a territory larger than Great Britain. The service was a close one. The appointments were in the gift of the Directors of the East India Company, and of the Government for the time being. They were as much out of the reach of the general public as partnerships in the great mercantile houses. Much the greatest number of them were bestowed on the sons, nephews, cousins, and political friends of the Directors. There were two objections to this system: first, that it narrowed the selection for offices for which it was important to secure the best ability of the country; secondly, that offices essentially public in their character were disposed of as if they belonged to private firms; so that both the service suffered, and the public were aggrieved at being shut out. Lord Macaulay, therefore, found willing listeners when he proposed to throw open this great service to public competition; nor were there any material objections to the mode of competition by examination which he proposed, supported as the proposal was by his usual brilliant style of reasoning. If, he argued, the prizes offered by the universities in the shape of honours and fellowships attract all the best ability of the country to contest them, how much more will places with incomes of thousands for hundreds at the universities, and dignities with which none but the highest in this country can compete, tempt the flower of English youth? And so the change was made. The pleasant family arrangement was put an end to. Haileybury disappeared. The competition wallah came on the stage. In one point Lord Macaulay's anticipations were not realised. The first rank of university men were not tempted away from Alma Mater by the dazzle of oriental wealth and grandeur. The competence which, at the least, such men could reckon upon at home outweighed the promise of riches in the torrid zone. But, with this exception, things happened exactly according to expectation. Candidates eagerly came forward, and great competition made a high standard attainable. Of the result, as far as regards India, different opinions have been put forth. laudator temporis acti accuses the wallah of being no gentleman, of not being able to ride, of being fussy and bumptious, but I do not know that any fault has been found with his work. On the other hand, officials of the old school who have had wallahs under them have cordially acknowledged their ability and usefulness; and it is certain that the competition has put an end to a class of civilians who used to be called 'Company's hard bargains.'

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On the whole, it is not to be wondered at that the plan of selection for offices by competitive examination has been extended, as it now has, to all branches of the public service. It has some very powerful recommendations, the simplicity and ease of its application,

the exemption it offers from the difficulties of patronage and the evils of jobbery, the fairness with which it throws open the public service to the whole country, and the wide area from which it is able to select. With this strong list of advantages, the position of the examination system might well be supposed to be impregnable, and it might be thought to savour of presumption even to hint at doubts of its perfection; but it must be remembered that the desideratum in appointing to public offices is not primarily to extinguish nepotism and jobbery, or to be fair to all classes, still less to make the selection as easy as possible, but to get the best men for the services to be performed. The real inquiry, then, is how far the examination system accomplishes this, and this inquiry I shall venture to make.

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There is a tacit assumption, and a very natural one, that the numerical results obtained by marks are evidence of scientific accuracy. Hence it is inferred that, given a place to be filled up, you have only to institute a competitive examination, and you will get, with the certainty of Euclid, a list of candidates in exact order of fitness. one, perhaps, would seriously argue for absolute certainty, but I feel sure that the idea of mathematical exactness does to an unsuspected extent influence public opinion in the matter, whereas, in fact, mathematical processes extend no farther than the correct adding up of the marks and producing an exact total. That total is only the summing up of a number of decisions, to no one of which can absolute certainty be attributed. A stream cannot rise higher than its source The aggregate judgment cannot be more reliable than the individual judgments. Fifty worthless judgments cannot make up one sound one, and yet, in the form of a numerical result, they may count as In practice, so far from any given total of marks representing absolute merit, I believe that no one who knows anything practically about examinations will deny that, in a dozen different examinations of the same candidates by the same examiners, and in the same subjects, it is highly improbable that any two lists should give exactly the same order. I think, therefore, that examinations are generally taken for more than they are worth. They have their value, but it obviously depends on the right interpretation and correct appreciation of their results. It ought to be clearly ascertained what their province is, what qualifications they are capable of eliciting, what are the sources of error to which they are liable, and what is the limit of such errors.

one.

An investigation of this kind would show the causes of many disappointments occasioned by a blind reliance on examinations, and which have sometimes induced an equally unfounded depreciation of them. People meet a senior wrangler in society, wonder he is not a brilliant talker, or a man of universal accomplishment, and straightway conclude that there is nothing in being senior wrangler at all. They might as well find fault with him for not being able to talk

Chinese. A high classman makes a bad schoolmaster or a bad man of business, and people set down a university class as a sham. That is simply because they are ignorant of what a university class represents. If I may venture to express my own opinion on a subject of such extent and difficulty, I should say that the province of examinations is restricted to testing knowledge, and the ready producing of knowledge, that they have comparatively small means of eliciting original ability, still less of appraising capacity of mind; and no means at all of ascertaining the balance of the mental powers or the soundness of the judgment. Bacon says, in a well-known passage, "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.' I think examinations test all these qualifications with regard to the subjects examined in. The man who succeeds in examinations has quickness in acquiring, memory for retaining, and readiness in producing knowledge; but he may be altogether deficient in reflection, in grasp of mind, in judgment, in weight of character. The man he outstrips may be one whose faculties are not so flexible, and therefore will not take training so well, who thinks too much to acquire knowledge rapidly, who refuses to accept other men's views without verifying them for himself, who, when he has acquired knowledge, is awkward at producing it, and has none of the tact which makes the most of what it possesses, and instinctively avoids exposure of ignorance; who, in fact, is too truthful and straightforward to write what he is not sure of, and is above making random shots. The first man has probably reached his highest point. The second may have a long period of development before him. In that case, the former is like a small vessel full, the latter like a large vessel with much space still to be occupied. The examination test gives only the amount, not the capacity. In such a case, after-life will almost certainly reverse the verdict. It appears to me that the examination system tends to select minds acute rather than deep, active rather than powerful, and the worst is that the heavier metal, being generally more slow in development, is apt to be left in the background. I believe that, under a competitive system, some of our best Indian administrators not only might not, but could not, have been selected.

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to I bring, therefore, this very serious charge against the system; that, though it undoubtedly gives a high average of talent and attainment, yet it has a direct tendency to exclude an important and valuable class of minds-powerful, capacious, and capable of great after-development.

Another charge is that it tends to exclude candidates who may have special qualifications for the service required, but whose minds, often on that very account, are not correspondingly developed in other subjects of instruction. The very merits of such candidates stand in their way. Again, an examination is quite incapable of