Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/83

 measure a boy's ability. It is the average, and not the single test that truthfully measures a student's accomplishments.

I always like to hear a group of high school boys discussing grades. From such discussions, of which I have heard not a few, I would draw the conclusion that from the high school boy's point of view at least, grades do not indicate fairly a boy's accomplishment in any subject. Grades are in no sense an index of a student's real ability and do not show what he has "got out of a subject." They do not suggest anything of what he is likely to accomplish after he is through with school and college and has gone into the practical work of life. If a mistake has ever been made in a boy's grade, and such mistakes the boy admits are legion, it has always been that he has been marked lower than he deserved. I have never yet heard a boy complain that his teacher had given him a grade higher than he was entitled to. The assigning of grades, he is convinced, is very much a lottery. The teacher very likely writes the names of his students on slips of paper and puts them in one hat, and a series of grades on other slips and puts these in another hat, pulls out a name and then a grade and thus settles each boy's fate. It is a pretty generally accepted doctrine that nothing gives a teacher so much or so exquisite joy as to be able to flunk a boy. The more he flunks the more pleasure he gets out of his work.

To begin with, grades are symbols only; they should never be taken quite literally. They are meant merely to