Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/72

 It was the thought of the race itself that put nerve into Jim. It was the contact with the other fellows and the stimulus of competition that urged him on and made him win. Jim would never have been much of a runner unless he had been put into a race, and no one knew the fact better than the trainer. It is the same way with a boy in examinations.

A good many schools follow the practice of excusing from final examinations all students whose daily work averages above a certain grade. I know a good many high school boys who have never taken a final examination and who would not know how to do so creditably. It is a perfectly easy matter, if he is alert while in the classroom and regular in his class attendance, for a boy to keep his daily grades up and still to have very little general grasp of the subject. I have just answered a letter from the father of one of our freshmen in college. The boy has been dropped at the end of his first year for poor scholarship, and the father finds it difficult to understand why.

"George was always a good student in the high school," he wrote. "He never had to take an examination, and I can not see why he had done so badly in college."

In college George was required in his final examination to present a general view of the whole subject-matter covered in his course; he found it necessary to systematize his knowledge and to present his facts in an orderly fashion, and he had had no previous practice in doing this