We find our own opinions on the marking system excellently expressed for us by the Chronicle:

"Both methods [of electives] seem to work satisfactorily, and it is difficult to form a just estimate of their comparative value. But in one important feature our system appears to have a decided advantage. The course pursued at Harvard from its very nature compels the use of the marking system, ours dispenses with it, so far at least as to attempt no nice grading of scholarship by mark.

"The evils of the marking system, the extra work and trouble given the professor, going sometimes so far as to convert the instructor into a mere automatic registering machine, the impossibility of a fair and accurate adjustment of relative rank, and above all the danger of leading students to work for marks rather than for broad scholarship, have been so often and so forcibly demonstrated as to need no more than mention. These evils we avoid. The students in the seminary courses have no further incentives than the love of the study and the natural emulation that arises of working together. They have no reward other than the knowledge and training gained, nor, to judge from the results, is other needed.

"The system of prizes, of special rewards for scholarship is an inheritance from those same schoolboy college days and schoolboy views of which the Nation's correspondent speaks with such just disparagement. Such devices may have been necessary in the days when boys came to college at an age at which they are now not out of the high school; they seem superfluous when the age of a graduating class averages, as with us last year, nearly twenty-four years. In dispensing with such incentives we are but following the plan of German Universities, and apparently neither they nor we have any reason to complain of the effect upon scholarship."