SCOONES ON THE INDIAN CIVIL-SERVICE COMPETITIONS.
MR. SCOONES, a well-known and very able private tutor, has written a paper in the new number of Macmillan's Magazine on the Tests for the Indian Civil Service, which .should be studied by all who care either for that Service in particular, or for the validity of the Examination-test in general. No one who has not examined frequently, and experienced for himself the difficulty of administering a "marks" system with fairness and good results, will fully appreciate Mr. Scoones' remarks on this latter head, which are as acute and practical as they are full of real experience. But Mr. Scoones, like all genuine students, does not quite do justice to one side of the Competitive System, which appears, at first sight, a weak side. The great defect of these intellectual competitions is that they are apt to result in the success of men who are mere book-men, who know, and know accurately, the special subject they have studied, but who are not men of vivid perception, or of presence of mind in dealing with the emergencies of life. And yet com- plaints are often made,—Mr. Scoones, for instance, echoes them,—when a man, by readiness of faculty, and what we may call knowledge of the world (which tells far more on success at examinations than ordinary examiners are at all aware of), forges ahead of another who is greatly his superior in attain- ment on the subject to be tested. Mr. Scoones brings this charge against the Indian Civil-Service Examinations as they are at present conducted :—" Many a man of ready and fluent expression will make mere text-book reading do him extrava- gant service, and if this happens to be supported by certain suitable questions in a brief viva voce test, he will do far more than hold his own against a less lucky, but infinitely superior competitor." Now is this really a source of risk in the present system, or a protection against some of its greatest risks ? We are quite ready to admit that we would rather see fluent and ready expression,' and the presence of mind which makes the best possible use of the social openings of a viva voce test, appreciated in some other way, and not through the blundering over-estimate formed by the examiner of the young man's real attainments. We should very much prefer that the real student had full credit for his thorough knowledge, and that the comparatively superficial competitor who beats him by readiness, fluency, and tact, should get his marks for readiness, fluency, and tact, and not for attainments he does not possess. But things being as they are at present, —we will discuss presently Mr. Scoones's own sagacious proposal for mending them —we are disposed to think it a very good thing that these kinds of qualities do though unfortunately by seeming to the examiners to be what they are -not, earn a fair measure of success. The chances are that for half the positions a man may have to fill in India, the man of ready and fluent expression, and who shows tact in a viva voce test, will be more useful, by virtue of these quali- ties, than his more thorough-going rival, who knows his subject far better, but who has no readiness and fluency, and no tact in viva' voce. No doubt it is painful to see these qualities getting false credit for an amount of acquirement they do not indicate. But they are very useful qualities in them- selves. And as regards the effect on the Civil Service of India, we strongly hold that the weight gained, unfortu- nately by a side-wind, for these qualities, results in the choice of a good many men much fitter for their posts than those rivals, (who were greatly their superiors in acquirement and accurate knowledge, but their inferiors in presence of mind and intel- lectual alacrity,) would have proved. Let us protest, if we will, against the indirect mode in which these practical qualities obtain their reward, but let us not regret that as a matter of fact, the intellectual competition fails to pre- vent an indirect advantage from accruing to the qualities which will succeed in the world so long as the world is what it is.
One of the strongest points made by Mr. Scoones is his cen- sure of the practice of subtracting a fixed number of marks from the number actually attained by every candidate on every subject,—in the view of preventing candidates from coming up with a very superficial knowledge of a considerable number of subjects. Mr. Scoones says that 125 marks are deducted from the number obtained by every candidate on every subject,—no matter whether the number of marks allowed for that subject be 1,250 (as in mathematics), or only 375, as in the lan- guage and literature of France, Germany, or Italy. Such a rule is bad every way. In the first place, it puts a most unfair premium on the largely-marked subjects. If a man gets 1,000 marks for mathematics, i.e., four-fifths of the maxi- mum number, and 125 are deducted, he still retains 875, or seven-tenths of the maximum number, i.e., much more than hall- marks. But if another man gets 300 marks in German (again four-fifths of the maximum) and 125 are deducted, he retains only 175, that is only seven-ifteenths, decidedly less than half- marks ; and the disproportionate loss becomes greater still when the proportion of marks gained is less. It is obviously a blunder to guard against superficial knowledge by deducting the same number of marks in every subject. In a subject where only 375 marks can be gained, 125, or one-third, represent a respectable knowledge, the advantage of which is all lost to the candidate by this curious rile. In a subject where 1,250 can be gained, 125 represents the merest smattering of knowledge and is quite rightly not reckoned at all. A better rule would be to deduct a fixed proportion of the total number obtainable ; and a better still, to deduct that proportion only when the candidate obtains less tkan half-marks, giving him credit for all the knowledge he shows where that knowledge is really consider- able. What is wanted is not to diminish the credit gained by a thorough student for a full mastery of the subject, but to pre- vent a mere sciolist,—a "shallow sciolist," if Mr. Julian Gold- amid will pardon us the use of Lord Lyttelton's expression,— from gaining the advantage of very hasty and fragmentary preparation. We are even disposed to think that a certain number of marks might be added as a bonus to any man who receives more than a very high proportion, say, four-fifths of the whole, as a sort of special premium on thoroughness of preparation. The very same principle on which you take
away from the man who hath not even "that which he hath," notoriously warrants giving to the man who has made a super-excellent use of what he had, something more. What Mr. Scoones says on the arbitrary method of assigning marks pursued by different examiners is of the highest possible importance. We are persuaded that the Civil Service ought to have some permanent member of its Staff associated with the temporary Examiners in all examinations, for the very purpose of securing more continuity in the principles of conducting this intellectual stock-taking. It is quite certain that even an in- ferior principle continuously and undeviatingly applied will result better than an alternation of better and worse prin- ciples of estimate. You want to apply, as far as possible, in one year the same standard you applied the last • if you do not, you run the risk of doing great injustice, and Mx. Scoones shows that, at least as regards the Natural Science ' subjects, great injustice has actually been done by very marked swings of the pendulum.
But all these are comparatively trivial points, compared with Mr. Scoones's suggestion for the final selection of the Indian Civil Servants. What he proposes is that the intellectual test should be only preliminary, and that the last test should be a matter of personal judgment. If there are forty vacancies, he would take the first seventy names on the Examiners' list, and arrange them, not in order of merit, but merely alphabetically, and get these men together into a College. Over this College he would put a small jury of Presidents, chosen as carefully, for their knowledge of men and their power of gauging impartially real power, as the Civil Service Commissioners have been chosen for their very different work ; these Presidents would immediately proceed to select, on their own judgment, as- sisted, we suppose, by their impressions of the men as seen in actual life, and by any other tests they liked to apply, the forty nominees for the Civil Service, while distributing among the disappointed thirty such Uncovenanted Service appointments as they could, leaving a few absolute blanks, in order to make it clear that there was no vested right in an appointment for all the persons first chosen. These secondary appointments would be immediately bestowed, while the forty Civil servants would be kept together for a single year in the College, to obtain a knowledge of each other, and to pursue their more specially Indian studies still higher. Mr. Scoones holds that by this plan, the intellectual sieve being first applied, and the finer sieve, of the real moral estimation and judgment of sagacious men, only in the second place, we should get rid of patronage and its evils,' and yet be able to correct the false tendency of a purely intellectual gauge by very much safer and higher criteria. Of course, the difficulty would be the disposition to attribute the final judgments to favour, and not to the really educated sagacity of experienced judges of men. But after the first selection had been made without the possibility of favour, this later discrimination would not be open to the same suspicion, and at all events, we suspect it would result in a much better choice than the intellectual test taken alone. Till some such scheme as Mr. Scoones's is adopted, so far from regretting that presence of mind and knowledge of the world count for some- thing in obtaining marks, we shall rejoice that they do so. It is a misfortune when an inferior scholar is put above a superior, if the only object is to test their relative attainments ; but it is a great deduction from the otherwise inevitable falseness of an intellectual gauge for practical life, when the practical ability asserts itself even through the intellectual machinery, and a man who is the intellectual inferior, but the practical superior of his rival, comes to the front, in spite of the inadequate test applied.
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