No Amount of Cane

Evidence has been accumulated over the last 70 years in Britain, Europe and America to show that no amount of care in setting and marking essay-type examinations can eliminate the fallibility of subjective judgements. The publication of the Parkyn report represents, I hope, New Zealand's realisation of this simple fact.

It is a moral atrocity to rate an individual by a system which, when required to work to a moderate degree of accuracy, is wrong nearly as often as it is right.

Examinations cannot be improved until the examiner knows what he really wants.

One of the things he should want is to discover and encourage originality and diversity. The attempt to make all of a group of students satisfy a certain task equally is a reductio ad absurdam.

Nor should the purpose of examinations be that of passing some students and failing others, but rather that of discovering how the students stand in relation to each other, and how they differ from each other. This cannot be done by setting up a standard of passing or failing, as if there were only two conceivable students A and not-A (the elect and the nonelect), nor by the a priori assumption that there are four conceivable classes of students, A, B, C and D (of which D stands for the non-elect). There are, in fact, as many classes as there are students. It follows that the system of giving marks or grades for creative work is based on an artificial theory for which there is no foundation, as is shown by the variation of marks given to the same paper by different markers.

In an ideal system of education the notion of "failing" would have no place. Educational thinking would centre around the notions of growth and development — true success, after all, is not to be measured primarily by the accumulation of units, but by the degree and kind of growth achieved along the lines of individual capacity and personal needs.