A child is presented to the inspector, for example, as belonging to the intermediate course, first year. Is this correct? It may be that the child is at the foot of the class, or is even incapable of following the lessons. Thus, it may be that his class gives a very poor indication of his capacity. There are plenty of cases where the head-master, in order to please the parents, puts a child in a class too high for him. A rapid examination will suffice to test the grading. This testing is absolutely necessary, and presents no difficulty to the inspectors. They have the fortnightly report brought to them, examine the pupil's marks and his exercises, whereby they form a first impression. It is then necessary to ask some questions, and on this point we have something to say with respect to method. There are two ways in which the degree of instruction may be tested. There is what we may call the _casual method_, which consists in putting the first questions that come into the mind; and there is the _systematic method_, which consists in putting questions arranged in advance, whose difficulty is known, and for which we have a scale (p. 54), which shows the average number of errors to be expected from normal children of each age. The latter method takes no longer than the former, and is even easier, because it makes no demand on the imagination. Moreover, we consider it quite indispensable for fixing in an objective manner the degree of instruction of the defectives on the day of their admission to the special school. It is very important that this degree of instruction should be definitely known, because it will be necessary to refer to it every time one wants to find out to what extent the child is profiting by the special instruction. We shall return to this point in our concluding chapter.