We have entered once again upon that period which is agony for the student and joy to the instructor, according to the average undergraduate's viewpoint. Final examinations are upon us; a day and a night spent in hurried review of a course, remembering dates and names, movements, policies, statesmanship; hurried jottings of calculations, of supposedly important facts (if we know or have an idea of what the instructor likes): charred table-edges from forgotten cigarettes, a blue haze of tobacco smoke, heeled butts crowding the corners. Visions of the instructor who faithfully peruses his text in order that he may find catch questions (we imagine) and matters of no import, so that he may smile lightly when he sees the surprised visages of his students the following morning. Examination week--thank the powers that it comes in its intensity but once in a semester.

Cannot something be done about this spirit-sapping parasite? Like a leech it clings to our educational system: why? no one knows. Final examinations are little more than comprehensive reviews of the amount of information a student receives in a given course, while they could be made to be objective and really useful.

President Lowell of Harvard once said: "When a man's life ends, we ask what he has done; but a diploma from a school or a degree from a college is not an obituary, and when a student's education ends, we should ask, not what he has done, but what he is or has become.

"Yet most of our examinations are adapted to acertain little except knowledge, which tends to promote mere cramming; whereas the tests in the grass school of active life depend rather upon the ability to use information Surely examinations can be framed to measure not only knowledge, but the ability to comprehend and correlate what is known. In short, to test the grasp of a subject as a whole.

"One of the defects of much of our teaching and especially of the lecture system is that this part of the function of education is to a great degree lost from sight. An improvement in our examination system which will measure the grasp of a whole subject is, I believe the most serious advance that can be made in American education today."

The trouble with final examinations is that they are used and wielded by instructors as "big sticks," that instructors take advantage of this privilege in order to scare students into cramming a comprehensive review of a subject into their whirling brains, a process which makes the "visit" of the material endure for only the following twenty four hours.

An examination which would test the student's intelligence and ability to apply his knowledge is a product of the technical schools and certainly is a distinct improvement over the examination in use today in other lines of endeavor. Until examinations are given in such a spirit, until they become useful rather than artificial, until they serve as a test for understanding rather than the capacity to cram, they are one of the gravest defects in America's sieve-like educational system. Penn State Collegian. June S