The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Examinations
I MET him as he was coming out of University Hall just released from an examination in English 20. He was hot, revolutionary, protestant. The test had been imbecile, unfair, unreasonable. He had studied conscientiously, he said, only to be disappointed in what he had gone up against. He had got nothing that he had expected, and he was against the whole system.
A surgeon friend of mine told me once that when he performed his first independent operation for appendicitis instead of finding the offending appendage as he should have done just under the spot where he had been taught to make the incision, after an exciting game of hide and seek among the viscera, he discovered it tucked securely away behind the innocent patient's liver, from which spot he dug it out with some difficulty. Of course it was an idiotic and unreasonable place for an appendix to be in and no doctor ought to be expected to get the right answer under those conditions,—but unless he does he is likely to lose his patient, and flunk the quiz.
My experience has been that in real life we seldom get the problems we are looking for. The questions that are put to us are not like those in the book, and the examinations we must pass are very seldom the ones for which we have made such painstaking, diligent preparation. It is very desirable to know what the book says, but it is quite as necessary to have cultivated judgment and the power of independent thought.
What are examinations for?
The more difficult and unreasonable they are—and in college they are neither to any extreme—the more they are a test of a man's judgment or his resourcefulness, or his independence and originality. The right sort of preparation for an examination ought to Examinations give a man a broader and a more comprehensive view of the subject in question than he has got through his scrappy daily study; it ought to help him to organize his facts and to get a final grasp of his information.
An examination is most of all a test of a man's character, for it shows as nothing else can that a man is yellow and crooked, and a quitter, or that he is game, and square, and an intellectual fighter who can meet and conquer unexpected difficulties, honestly and independently—without cribbing and without whining.
And remember that in real life it is always the unexpected question that we must answer.
February