THE AIM of this study is to reveal the diversity of opinion among English teachers upon standards of selection and organization of subject content and upon standards of pupil achievement in the essentials of English literature and composition.

The purpose of this portion of the study is to learn (1) what objectives high-school composition teachers, the country over, profess to be striving for; (2) what methods they claim to employ in attaining these objectives; and (3) to what degree they actually practise their precepts. In order to obtain unprejudiced reactions, the prevailing practices of composition teachers were investigated first.

To discover what weight teachers assign to the various elements of composition, two studies were made, the second an elaboration of the first.

A southerner who was visiting a friend in Boston is said to have remarked to his host, "We guess, whereas you reckon"; to which the Yankee replied, "Yes, but we guess a great deal better than you'd reckon!" Both of these men were revealing the most natural, most common, most convenient, but most wasteful tendency in the world. Moreover, they may have been school teachers, for they were displaying the most irresponsible, most hazardous, most uneconomical, but most prevalent practice in education.

It at least is within the bounds of conjecture to surmise that wheu the head of one of our paleolithic homes found that the stone which he had kept for years lying handy upon his cave-mantel because it had been his most successful food-getter and foe-slayer was also useful in helping him to judge the weight of objects of barter, he discovered the art of measurement. His good wife, too, may have one day observed that her lord's war-club was exactly the length required for a new Easter skin. Thus by slowly evolving standards of weight and dimension this observing family may have exercised improved methods of social control and thereby gained a neighborhood prestige and ascendency.

The only scientific, objective composition scales so far devised have been designed to measure composition achievement. They consist either of instruments for measuring general merit, devices for measuring written expression analytically, or tests and scales for estimating familiarity with and proficiency in isolated elements of written language. The topics upon which the sample themes in all existing composition scales are based were chosen arbitrarily. All that was known about either the themes which were written upon those assignments or about the standards derived from those themes was that on such-and-such topics certain children did so-and-so. No one knew whether or not the reactions inspired by those assignments represented those children's real writing ability, or whether, if they did, the same topics would test the maximal writing capacities of all pupils in all grades.

When a teacher of any subject undertakes to classify his pupils, he should employ reliable means for discovering the highest level in his subject to which those pupils can attain. Such means have been devised for discovering maximal mental capacity, and are now being widely used under the name of intelligence tests. No such instrument has heretofore been consciously designed in the field of English composition. The scales that are in use measure achievement, but not necessarily ability. They show how well children do write, but not assuredly how well they can write. It is to show pupils' maximal capacity for writing that the first of these scales—the "Maximal Composition Ability Scale"—has been devised. Its samples are based upon that one of thirty-two varied and representative assignments which produced the highest median quality of ·composition from 770 junior- and senior-high-school pupils.