have the 90 to 100 per cent man. This is not only true in banking, but other business is the same. In the actual life of business and social affairs we demand accuracy and efficiency. There is no doubt that our students do not extend themselves to go beyond our expectations of them. We allow 70 per cent of subject mastered to pass and the majority hover around that point. In three schools with which I have intimate acquaintance the passing marks are 60, 70, and 75 per cent. The system of grading used in all three was an endeavor to say the student had grasped that per cent of the course. In these three schools the per cent of normal, superior and inferior students did not materially differ, but the standard of scholarship in the 75 per cent school was far ahead of the 60 per cent institution. If we would grade our students into inferior, normal, and superior, then divide the normal into inferior, normal and superior normal, it seems then we might set a higher standard for passing. The superior and superior normal should be the passing students while the inferior normal and inferior ones should repeat. Or on the basis of the per cent of subject mastered, students below 85 per cent should repeat. We must rectify deeply and much in our pedagogy, as well as in our educational system, if we are to take front rank among the nations, for the oriental mind is fast overtaking us and will soon be rivaling our boasted superior intellects. We must produce graduates who will make good from the start so that the indictment of one of our big business managers will no longer be true. He said, "The majority of the graduates of our educational institutions lack confidence and are too inaccurate for my use." The utilitarian idea has steadily been gaining in our educational system and with it must come the sloughing off the curriculum of many subjects of doubtful usefulness. We must introduce new subjects designed to help the student find himself. The crying need of our schools right now is an expert to discover the student's natural bent and assist the student in choosing aright his life work. This life, with its competition and specialization, has no place for the useless. Let everything in our system of education contribute to student's future enjoyment and worth as a citizen, and then our schools will serve the purpose which modern life demands of them. PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENTS FROM THE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY OF THE DeWITT CLINTON HIGH SCHOOL. BY GEO. W. HUNTER, PH. D. DeWitt Clinton High School, New York City The DeWitt Clinton High School is one of the largest schools in the United States, having at the present time about five thousand students within its doors; it is also one of the greatest college preparatory schools in the country. The Department of Biology and Hygiene has the unique privilege of administering to all of the students in the school. Every boy who receives a diploma must take one year of elementary biology, given during the first year of his course. In addition to this, he has instruction in hygiene one period each week throughout his school career. The department consists of twenty teachers, and the actual number of students registered for work last term was 4,185. Of this number, about two thousand take courses in elementary and advanced biology. It is evident that if the teachers of biology are specialists, as they are, and are interested in the problems of teaching, as this series of articles will prove them to be, that this school gives a rather interesting opportunity for experimental work, not only in the content of the course, but also in the methods of teaching. Those of us who are familiar with the suggested lists of experiments given in a bibliography published in SCHOOL SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS, January, 1911, by W. L. Eikenberry, may remember some of the suggested experiments outlined for solution. Several of these experiments, concerning the method of study best adapted to classroom and to laboratory work with young pupils, have been attacked by the writer. A somewhat extensive article on this topic will shortly appear in one of the pedagogical magazines published in this country. This same article also takes up certain other phases of the problems of biology teaching, basing the solution of the problem upon the interests of the children in biological science material rather than methods of presentation of the subject.1 It is not my intention in this brief article to call attention to this piece of work, but instead to introduce a series of experiments which are at the present time in process of performance in this school. The first of the series was brought about in an "A Critical and Experimental Investigation of the Present Day Secondary School Methods of the Teaching of Biology in the United States," G. W. Hunter, Ph. D. attempt at standardization of the teachers' work within the department. For several years it has been our custom to mark our final examinations in committee, each member of the committee being responsible for the marking of a question or group of questions on the papers. Owing to stress of work at examination time, and the fact that such methods of examination were not economical of the teachers' time, the members of the department voted to go back to the individual marking of examination questions. This has been done for the past two years, but in order to try out the reliability of the individual teacher in examination rating, the following experiment was proposed and started by Frank M. Wheat, a former member of the department. Owing to Mr. Wheat's promotion to the care of a school of his own, the experiment has been finished and written up by me: We are all familiar with recent work on the unreliability of examinations as a test. In the work of Starch and Elliot we find that individuals have graded mathematics papers with very great differences in individual marking, and in his recent book3 Starch has given numerous examples of the individual unreliability of teachers' examination grades. In order to test the reliability of grading in our own department, the following mimeographed sheet was sent to each teacher in the depart ment: To Teachers of Biology: X's.. Kindly find herewith a copy of paper, giving questions and answers. Please grade the same and return to the Chairman tomorrow morning. Each question has a value of twenty (20); the parts of the question, as indicated. Do not sign your answer paper. Q. 1. (a) Draw a sketch or diagram (5) and label five parts of the essential organs of the flower (5). (b) Give the use of any three parts labeled (6). (c) Tell very briefly how the seed and fruit are formed (4). Anther Ans. (a) (b) Petal attracts insect because of color. Anther produces pollen. Stigma is sticky, receives and holds pollen. (c) Two processes, pollination and ferPetal tilization, take place. The bee leaves the pollen on the stigma, causing fertilization; pollen grows down the pollen tube, and enters the ovule; the sperm cell fertilizes the egg cell. Then the ovule de velops by increasing the number and The ovary changes, grows into a fruit and Ovary · Sepal kind of cells into a seed. holds the seeds. Q. 2. (a) Draw a seed (2); label parts of embryo (3). (b) Prove by experiment that the seed contains a nutrient (5); (c) What carbohydrate Starch, D., and Elliot, E. C., "Reliability of Grading Work in Mathematics," School Review, Chicago, April, 1913, Vol. 21, pp. 254, 259. Educational Measurements, D. Starch, McMillan, 1916. is found in the bean seed (1)? Explain what is done with this when the seed grows (4). (d) Why does digestion occur (5)? -Tosta Ans. (a) (b) The seed contains a nutrient, starch. We know this because we can prove it by testing part of the seed, the cotyledon, in a test tube, adding water, shaking, boiling, cooling, adding iodine and getting a blue color which is the test that proves that starch is present. (c) Starch; it is digested. (d) Because an enzyme is present in the cotyledon of the bean. Cotyledon Plumute Show, in the form Q. 3. Growing seedlings need air in order to grow. of an experiment, what part of the air they use (20). Ans. I took some seeds and put them into a jar. I then sealed the jar tight. After several days, I looked at the seeds and noticed they had not grown. I then tested the air of the jar and found carbon dioxide present. I therefore conclude that plants use oxygen. Q. 4. Make a diagram of a bean or a pea plant to show the path by which water from the soil reaches the leaves. Label all the parts of the diagram and explain the use of each part labeled (20). vein Fibrovascular Bark Root -Roothairs Ans. (1) Root hairs, the organs that take up water. (2) Root, lower part of plant. (3) Bark, outer part of plant. (4) Fibrovascular bundles, tubes through which water goes up stem. (5) Veins, the places where water gets into the leaves. Q. 5. (a) Give the use of seed (2), stem (2) and roots (2) of a plant to a plant; and to a man. Give examples. (Total 12 points.) (b) What does a plant take from its environment? (8) Ans. (a) Seed is used to produce new plants, as a food for man; ex.: beans. Stem is passageway for food and holds up leaves, food for man; examples: leeks, lumber. The roots anchor, storage, take in water, food; examples: beet, carrot, medicine, root beer. (b) Air, through leaves; soil and water, through roots; light and temperature. The above questions and answers were bona fide questions and answers taken at random from different papers and the whole made into a composite paper, so that the members of the department were confronted with actual questions and answers which were known to only one member of the department, Mr. Wheat. The several questions comprising the test were given to students during their first term's work in biology, the age of each student averaging about fourteen years. It was obvious that the biological information of such students, born and nurtured in a great city, would not be very great. The results of the ratings given by fourteen different teachers are extremely interesting, as they show a very great variation in grading. So far as I am aware, no previous experiment in grading had been given in which the teacher had a definite weight for each question and part of a question graded. A glance at the preceding table shows an astonishing range in grades, even with a carefully worked out schedule of ratings already given the teacher; for example, Question 1: the range is from 8 to 20 points, the median of the curve being 15. The second question which, by the way, is a bad series, shows a flat curve ranging from 12 to 18 points. In the third question, owing to lack of rigidity on the part of some teachers or carelessness 10 5 14 Question III as to the meaning of experimental form, the ratings range from zero to 15 points; in the fourth question, a slightly more uniform rating obtains, a smooth curve showing, the rating being from |