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REPORT ON THE ANNUAL EXAMINATION HELD AT QUEEN'S COLLEGE
FROM JANUARY 3RD TO 16TH, 1896.
QUEEN'S COLLEGE, HONGKONG, 31st January, 1896. GENTLEMEN, We have the honour of reporting to you the result of the Annual Exams held by us at Queen's College during the current month.
In accordance with instructions received from you we have examined, either by written work orally, "all the subjects taught in the College including the Chinese school," with the exception Shorthand which we understand is at an elementary stage--it being undesirable that boys cotonet cing this subject should be subjected to any test in it until they have arrived at a certain standard: efficiency.
The examination occupied 11 days (January 3rd to 16th), exclusive of one day given to the Chinese school; and on 8 of these days the work was carried on in the afternoon as well as in the morning.
Papers were set in all the subjects offered except Reading, Conversation, and the Pupil Teachers' Practical Work, which were taken orally. Great care was taken to preserve, as far as possible, the standard hitherto adopted in the Annual Examinations, the questions being carefully chosen to test the knowledge which had been imparted to the boys in those portions of their subjects which they had been taught. Only in three instances was it pointed out by the Head Master that we had exceeded this limit, and then due allowance was inade in the awarding of marks. The papers were generally slightly longer than usual, in order to give as much scope as possible; aud it is hoped that the tabulated results on the mark sheets may afford some means of comparison between the work in this examina tion and that of last year.
We have, however, in order to avoid too severe a test, taken 40 per cent, instead of 50 per cent. for the minimum of marks necessary to obtain a "pass." It was thus possible for any boy, doing a little well, to pass.
In reporting upon the work of 566 boys it is impossible, without being inconveniently lengthy to give more than a general view of the examiners' opinion of the work done. To do this would necessitate a detailed report upon each class, or set of parallel divisions, and as this cannot be done we would draw attention to the mark sheets, which have been prepared to show not only the order of merit in each division, but also the percentage of marks obtained in each subject by each boy, and the anl passes percentage of passes in each subject in each division, as well as the actual unmber of failures awarded to each boy.
With regard to the actual work, as might be expected in a school of this kind and size where some boys have been so long and some so short a time under tuition, the work showed great, uneven-i ness. But what is less easily accountable is the fact that the boys in one class, not excepting the First, showed great disparity of knowledge or of power to reproduce it. There were a good many cases of The best conspicuous success, but there was also a lamentable amount of weak and inaccurate work. subjects were Writing, Algebra and Book-keeping, and the worst Conversation, Composition, Latio, Euclid.
Marks were assigned for Writing throughout the school, and this was very creditable and satis factory.
In Reading and Conversation the examiners took all the boys, 5 or 6 at a time, in a separata room and devoted from 15 to 25 minutes to each group. Every boy read before the examiners af least twice, many three times; and conversations were engaged in between the examiners and the boys, or between the boys themselves in the presence of the examiners. The reading and conversa tion in the First and Second Classes were very satisfactory, showing that the test applied was not too severe, and also that boys could be taught to read clearly and intelligently, and learn to converse sid a fair command of idiom. But the majority of this work in the rest of the school leaves room for much improvement. We do not think it a good plan that reading should be taught by Chinese Masters, and we are of opinion that more time should be given to the cultivation of the habit
composing and speaking simple sentences idiomatically. At the Head Masters' Conference in England hell last month, it was resolved that-"It is desirable that modern languages be taught more collo- quially thau is customary in schools at present," and we think that much of the deficiency in speaking English which we noticed in the greater part of the school might be supplied if some time were given to the teaching of colloquial English. We do not see from the table of hours of work supplied to us that any time is given especially to this subject; the 244 hours a week put down for conversation appears to mean no more than that the boys are taught various subjects in English, by European or Chinese Masters, during that number of hours. We feel sure from our experience that no definite imvement can be effected in this matter unless especial attention is paid to it.
In the lower classes, where the number of pages of the reading book prepared was small, the boys had read the same piece so frequently that, on five out of six occasions when the cxaminers asked a boy to close his book and repeat four or five lines which he had just read, they were repeated verbatim with as much fluency as when the book was open before him. The consequence of this frequent reading of the same passage is that boys get into the habit of not looking carefully at the whole of a word, and when, in an unfamiliar passage, the eye catches sight of a word slightly similar to one better known, the boy pronounces the latter and seems totally unconscious that he is making nonsense We noticed a very common mistake, which ought to be remedied at once; nouns in the singular were read as plural and vice versa, tenses in the present as past and vice versa. The same mistakes occur in the written work of all the Classes.
of the sentence.
The Dictation was taken in each Class, except in Class I., from the part of the reading book which the boys had prepared, in order that there should be no unfamiliar words in the piece chosen. And care was taken that the unfamiliar voices of the examiners should not in any way make the passage unduly difficult.
A boy was allowed to make six mistakes and yet to pass (errors in punc- tuation counting, and in spelling 1). In spite of this--and the portion on which marks were assigned was no longer than in previous years--there were too many failures; we think that a good many of these might have been avoided by inore care on the part of the boys, and if English Masters only had been allowed to teach reading. Punctuation was very weak especially in the Middle Classes. The writing was good, and it was pleasing to find several perfect papers in Classes IV., VII. and VIII. Composition.-As in previous examinations the boys in Class I. were asked to write an essay. Three subjects were given (The Sports and Pastimes to be seen in Hongkong, The Peak Tramway, and The Benefits of Foreign Trade), and boys were invited to select one and write upon it. We were much pleased with the work in I.A.; two or three essays being excellent, and the mistakes in composition very few. In the other classes, II. to V., a short story was read out twice by an English Master, and an explanation of it given in Chinese by a native Teacher. The boys were then instructed to reproduce the story in their own words, A few boys acquitted themselves creditably,
but the mass of the work was very poor. We do not feel sure that this is the best method of teaching Composition, as boys seem to try too much to reproduce the exact words they have heard; and they make this effort at the expense of the sense. Much attention is needed to this subject. We think it would be better to teach the boys to compose and write correctly short sentences relating to some simple subject chosen by a Master; afterwards to write longer ones and to combine them. Many papers were quite unintelligible.
Grammar.We were satisfied with the work of LA. and I. C,A., and also of II.A., where there was evidence of good teaching, and we found the analysis of sentences on the whole good. Much of the work of the other Classes was ruined by inaccuracy and by an inability to express correctly what had been learnt by heart. Too much dependence is put upon rote-work. It may be necessary for a teacher to know that "an adjective is a word that may be joined to a noun to describe, to delimit, or to point to, that which we are naming by the noun," but it is not good to burden the memory of Chinese boys with such things unless it is desired to "sacrifice Education to Examination." Many hoys had been taught to reproduce this definition, but the majority of them, in this and other cases, made nonsense of what they had tried to commit to memory. And when a boy in the Third Class, who has been in the school three years, writes such rubbish as "The common noun distinguishes as proper nouns the things, persons or places are given the name to it that is used for proper," it is time to consider whether the whole method of teaching Grammar from a text-book does not require revision. This is only a sample of the many unintelligible answers with which the majority of teemed. Such a provincialism (appearing in about 75 per cent. of the papers) as "shew" for the past tense of " to show" ought not to be possible, and the learning of difficult definitions and explanations
papers