Education: New College Boards

Buried last week was a 41-year-old collegiate tradition: the dreaded old College Board examinations. The College Entrance Examination Board decided to drop its traditional essay examinations and substitute relatively painless achievement tests.

Each June since the College Boards were started in 1900, boys and girls aspiring to U.S. Eastern colleges have had to go through the ordeal of two-or three-hour tests in college preparatory subjects. Even pedagogues disliked them; a Carnegie Foundation survey found some of them so fuzzy that the same geometry paper was graded 33 and 67 by different examiners.

No such grind as the old College Boards, the new tests measure two qualities: scholastic aptitude (skill in reading, problem-solving, etc.) and “general achievement” (a short-answer test of knowledge in certain fields). Advantages: both can be taken in a single day and they are easy to grade.

In the short-answer test the candidate is examined on three subjects which he picks from the following nine: biology, chemistry, physics, French, German, Latin, Spanish, social studies, spatial relations (e.g., shown a profile view of a telephone instrument, a candidate may be required to draw the unseen dimensions).

The Board began to try the new tests in 1937, has given them in April each year since, at first to candidates for college scholarships, then to regular matriculants. Last year 10,917 of the 23,244 College Board examinees took the new, shorter tests, but twelve die-hard colleges (Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Haverford and eight leading women’s colleges) made applicants take the essay examination in June. Last week they finally capitulated.