Education: Or a Reasonable Facsimile

He was a marine, stationed in the Aleutians, and the call of the wild got him. Walking his post without even a tree for company, he thought it might be nice to settle down in Alaska after the war and mine platinum. Mining, he knew, was a science. There were colleges that could teach him—but he had enlisted after only a year and a half of high school.*

By last week the marine—and more than 500,000 other veterans and civilians —had earned a new kind of sheepskin called an “equivalency certificate.” Equivalencies are the year-old idea of the American Council on Education, which saw the need of grading special cases with the right knowledge but not the right papers (e.g., the girl who studied with private tutors, the diplomat’s son who went to school abroad). Many wanted the certificates to apply for college; more needed them to land jobs that called for high-school diplomas or a reasonable facsimile.

To win an equivalency, a person must pass five two-hour exams measuring his intelligence instead of his memory. The literature quiz does not expect him to describe Macbeth; it gives him a passage from the play, and asks questions to see how much of it he understands.

Last week the American Council reported that its equivalency certificate is now issued by 36 states and the District of Columbia.†

*The average World War II veteran completed his high-school sophomore year. World War I veterans averaged only a sixth-grade education,

†The holdouts: New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine. Eight other states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mississippi, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nevada, Montana and California—do not give equivalency diplomas, but let students take equivalency tests for courses they have missed.