A survey of the educational system of the Philippine islands by the Board of educational survey, created under acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature.

194 EDUCATIONAL SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES

sions; (2) the construction of tests and measurement of results obtained from experiments carried on in the Academic Division; (3)
quantitative studies of the tendencies and trends of growth within the
system; (4) annual studies of the progress of children through the
grades of the school, together with studies of age-grade distribution,
promotion, elimination, and retardation; (5) studies of the classification
of pupils.
THE ANNUAL EXAMINATION OF ALL PUPILS ABOVE THE THIRD
GRADE BY THE CENTRAL BUREAU SHOULD BE DISCONTINUED
At the present time the Bureau of Education attempts to examine
annually the individual children of the schools of the Islands from the
fourth grade through the high school. The final examinations for the
Grades VII to XI, inclusive, are prepared each year in the central Bureau in Manila; those in Grades IV, V, and VI in the offices of the
division superintendents. These examinations are permitted now to
play a part in school administration which is far more important than
their validity justifies. Fifty per cent of the rating given the year's
work of each individual pupil is constituted by the mark given the final
examination. Because the final examinations are not valid measures
of the true work of the schools this exerts a very harmful influence
on instruction. It has centered the attention of teachers on fact-learning
and has cut down the length of the school by more than a month to
provide for a "wasteful review."
The Bureau's examinations are precisely of the type generally employed by state examining boards, college entrance examination boards,
and many city systems in the United States. They are not valid and
complete measures of the work of either individual pupils or school
systems because of these defects:
(1) Their content does not adequately cover the content of the
curriculum. Each examination is made, a priori, on the judgment of an
individual teacher or administrator assigned to the task by the Bureau.
(2) They attempt to measure a very broad field of study with a few
selected questions. (3) They are entirely ungraduated as to difficulty.
The examiner is never sure of the difficulty of the elements of the test
and hence does not know how they should be arranged. (4) The
weights assigned to different questions are arbitrary and are not proportioned in terms of either social importance or difficulty of learning.
(5) The scoring of papers is entirely arbitrary and personal. Marks
of different readers vary so widely that they are not valid measures
of pupil's work.
These conclusions rest upon the accumulated results of fifteen years
of careful research in the United States. During that time the problem