Word: flunk
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Worried by overcrowding, low admission standards and lax discipline, a group of alumni in 1961 persuaded the Boston school committee to institute competitive entrance exams and to transfer elsewhere students who flunk a subject two years in a row. The real rejuvenation started only with the appointment three years ago of Headmaster Wilfred O'Leary, an unashamed autocrat with a classics degree from Boston College who cracks heads as easily as he conjugates Latin verbs...
...excellent. It inculcates in the boys some good working habits as well as giving them some spending money." Several of the boys felt that the program was a good supplement to their vocational training in high school. One boy said, "This program helps keep me in school. If I flunk a subject, then I can't work here. They give me a tutor...
Whatever a Japanese student's goal, the good life beckons the moment he gets past the narrow entrance-examination gate. Since the accent is on rote memorization of facts, a student can always cram to pass a test and he has to be atrociously uninterested to flunk out. For rural youths, the excitement of living in Tokyo compensates for classroom tedium. Money is rarely a problem. A student can find board and room-the universities have few dorms-for as little as $30 a month. A curry-and-rice lunch costs 30 cents. He can meet his tuition...
...Ashley Montagu that in the Australian Aborigine's society, he would rightfully be regarded as an intellectual idiot who could neither track a wallaby nor throw a boomerang. As Anthropologist Stanley Garn has dryly noted, if the Aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. "It is possible that some of the behavioral differences between human groups may be genetically determined," says University of Michigan Anthropologist Ernst Goldschmidt. "These may include differences in intelligence, but such differences may equally be due to cultural determinants. The question simply remains open." Harvard Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew points...
...shaky educational backgrounds acquired in Houston's Negro high schools; other large student contingents even worse prepared, come from East Texas and Louisiana. Many courses are remedial, and most are taught directly out of textbooks. The beginning freshman English course is entitled "Oral Communication." Students claim that most freshmen flunk English at least once, and one girl is reported to have taken the first semester of the course nine times before finally passing with a D. Many instructors teaching remedial courses are on one-year, renewable contracts, and students complain that they are often more concerned about their jobs than...