No allowance is made for nervousness, illness, or temperamental conditions, but the same measuring-rod is applied to all with no discrimination, and she has the marks on the papers to prove her infallibility.  If a pupil should dare to question the correctness of her grades, he would be punished or penalized for impertinence.  Her grades are oracular, inviolable, and therefore not subject to review.  She may have been quite able to grade the pupils justly without any such ordeal, but the school has the examination habit, and all the sacred rites must be observed.  In that school there is but one way of salvation, and that way is not subject either to repeal or amendment.  It is via sacra and must not be profaned.  Time and long usage have set the seal of their approval upon it and woe betide the vandal who would dare tamper with it.

=Testing for intelligence.=—­This emphatic, albeit true, representation of the type of examinations that still obtains in some schools has been set out thus in some detail that we may have a basis of comparison with the other type of examinations that tests for intelligence rather than for memory.  For children, not unlike their elders, are glad to have people proceed upon the assumption that they are endowed with a modicum of intelligence.  They will strive earnestly to meet the expectations of their parents and teachers.  Many wise mothers and teachers have incited children to their best efforts by giving them to know that much is expected of them.  It is always far better to expect rather than to demand.  Coercion may be necessary at times, but coercion frowns while expectation smiles.  Hence, in every school exercise the teacher does well to concede to the pupils a reasonable degree of intelligence and then let her expectations be commensurate with their intelligence.

=Concessions.=—­It is an affront to the intelligence of a child not to concede that he knows that the days are longer in the summer than in winter.  We may fully expect such a degree of intelligence, and base our teaching upon this assumption.  In our examinations we pay a delicate compliment to the child by giving him occasion for thinking.  We may ask him why the days are longer in summer than in winter and thus give him the feeling that we respect his intelligence.  Our examinations may always assume observed facts.  Even if he has never noted the fact that his shadow is shorter in summer than in winter, if we assume such knowledge on his part and ask him why such is the case, we shall stimulate his powers of observation along with his thinking.  If the teacher asks a boy when and by whom America was discovered, he resents the implication of crass ignorance; but if she asks how Columbus came to discover America in 1492, he feels that it is conceded that there are some things he knows.