CHEMICAL EDUCATION by Homan and Hodge entitled "A Study of the Reliability of Examination Marks in General Chemistry" interested me greatly since I made a similar study about eight years ago. The results of my study were presented to the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers a t their 85th meeting a t Yale University on December 8, 1923, and published in the reports of the Association.My paper differed from the one recently published in that I made no attempt to tabulate the results question by question, but instead tried to compare the marks of different groups of teachers.My study was based on 153 marks given by as many diierent teachers to a single chemistry test. The individual marks ranged from 40 to 85% hut these are more or less isolated cases and on the whole the results were fairly satisfactory since schools having widely different classes of students, standards of passing, and courses in chemistry are represented. Of the marks, 63% were between 55% and 69.9%.On comparison of the marks given by different groups little of value was obtained. Most significant was a compilation which took into consideration the difference in the passing mark a t the various institutions represented. This was early recognized as one of the chief reasons for variation of marks. It was found that teachers in schools with a passing mark of 70% tended to rate papers higher than those in schools with a 60% passing mark, but not sufficiently high to cause the percentage of students passing in both cases to be equal.At the time I made my study I found no record of such an investigation covering a chemistry paper, although there are studies covering almost the entire range of elementary and secondary school subjects.Very truly yours,
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