A Dividing Line

The question involved here may be asked in another way: how much education has an individual received if he has failed, or just passed, and so on—How much more has a person with first-class honours learned than a person with second-class?

The traditional examination, like a hurdle, is a crude thing: it divides people up into those who manage to make it over the top and those who don't. But the purpose of an assessment system is not to provide a jumping contest, or indeed a contest of any kind. It is to assess the extent to which an individual has profited from exposure to the experience of education. And, inevitably, it remains as much a test of the teacher as of the taught.

One of the worst troubles with the whole examination system is that it has been devised by professors, and professors are generally experts in their subject matter rather than experts in the learning process or in instructional practices. As a result they tend to be inflexible in teaching according to the patterns to which they were exposed.

New Zealand's academics, it must be admitted, are by and large a rather sorry lot. Many of them