Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/493

Rh discuss how much it costs to train men in physics in these different institutions and sets up a standard of measurement of what he calls the "student hour," the cost of teaching a student the subject of physics for a single hour. After an elaborate system of figures and a great deal of computation he discovers what is supposed to be the cost of teaching a student in physics for one hour in Harvard and Boston Tech, and these different institutions. Now whether his figures really represent the cost or not is questionable, but there can be no doubt that they do not gauge the efficiency of the institutions under consideration.

The efficiency of an automobile is not gauged by its cost, and certainly the efficiency of Harvard or Boston Tech is not gauged by their cost. You must of course look to the product. Now a man of Mr. Cooke's acumen could not overlook so obvious a fact, although he passes it over with almost unpardonable brevity in a report that professes to deal with the question of efficiency. He does not always seem quite true to himself. He tells us in one place that "the cost per student-hour has absolutely no value in distinguishing relative educational values." Elsewhere he says "certainly some idea of quality will be gained by simply knowing the cost." However, he does recognize that the quality of the product must be tested before we have any real gauge of efficiency, but when it comes to suggestions for a test of quality he formulates a plan that a serious educator could regard only with laughter or with tears. Here it is—let us establish a central bureau to which may be submitted the examination papers and the answers from the five highest and five lowest students, and let the central authority assign marks for the difficulty of the questions and the rigor with which they were answered. I shall not presume upon your patience by pointing out to what abuses such a plan would be exposed, nor how paltry a contribution it is towards the solution of an extremely important national problem. I should like, however, to call your attention to various matters to be kept in view when we set out on the task of testing the efficiency of any educational institution.

I would remark at the outset that the matter is extremely complex and that no wise man would even dream of giving a numerical measure of the efficiency of Harvard or the University of Kansas. He would no more do that than he would say that the efficiency of his friend Jones is 62, and of Smith is 55. On the face of it, such apparent accuracy is ridiculous. But we do want to know in a general way how we are to gauge efficiency, and I need only sketch the process which is a fairly obvious one. The natural way of attacking the problem would be to attack it directly. We are interested not in the machinery but in the product. The obvious procedure would be to examine the product in the different institutions and see how they stand relatively to one another. We would have, of course, to set out with some