It is necessary, moreover, for the administrator to judge of the student's success as well as of his diligence. Twice every year the professors hold an examination lasting for three hours in each of their several courses. Of late years an ingenious means has been devised for making the examination system an even more perfect ally of the police. In the middle of each term an examination of one hour is held to insure that the student has not only attended lectures but studied outside; and, in order to expose the procrastinator, it has become the custom for the examination to be given without warning. Like the lecture system, the examination system throws the onus of discipline on the studious and the teachers. Two thousand students write yearly 32,000 examination books. Quite obviously the most advanced of the professors cannot spare time for the herculean task of reading and duly grading their share of these books. They give over most of them to underpaid assistants. The logical result of such a system is that the examinations tend to be regarded merely as statements of fact, and the reading of the books merely as clerical labor. If academic distinctions are disprized in America, both in college and out of it, this is amply explained by the fact that they attest a student's diligence rather than his ability. They are awarded, like a Sunday-school prize, in return for a certain number of good-conduct checks. It is not enough that the machinery of instruction wastes the time of the student and debases the office of the examiner; it is, as I have said, the cause of the break-down of the elective system. As long as each student is required to pursue every study under the eye of the disciplinarian, the decision as to what he shall study rests not with his desires or his needs, but with an elaborate schedule of lectures and examinations. So excessive are the evils of the present system that no less a man than Professor William James has advocated the abolition of the examinations. This remedy is perhaps extreme; but the only alternative is almost as radical. It is to enable the student, at least the more serious student, to slip the trammels of the elective system, and to study rationally, and to be rationally examined in, the subject or group of subjects which he prefers. In a word, the remedy is to divide and organize our courses of instruction for the more serious students into groups corresponding in some measure to what the English call honor schools.