The basic reason students remain long on courses stems from inept criticism by instructors regarding what is required.

There is a technology of criticism of art, expressed beautifully in the Encyclopaedia published by Focal Press.

In this article it stresses that a critic who is also an expert artist tends to introduce unfairly his own perfectionism (and bias and frustrations) into his criticism.

We suffer amazingly from this in all our courses. I had not previously spotted it because I don’t demand a student at lower levels produce results found only in higher levels.

You can carelessly sum this up by „letting the student have wins“ but if you do you’ll miss the whole point.

Example: A student up for a pass on his Itsa is flunked because he or she couldn’t acknowledge.

But a student at the Itsa level hasn’t been taught to acknowledge.

This student hasn’t even read the data on acknowledgement.

So the student can’t pass Itsa level and so never does get to the level where acknowledge­ment is taught — and if he does, really never passed, in his own mind, Itsa and so hasn’t advanced.

And we catch all our students this way and they don’t therefore learn.

How is this done? How could this be?

The instructor is an expert auditor. That’s as it should be. But as an expert auditor, bad execution of a level above where the student is studying, pains the instructor. So he flunks the student because the auditing looks bad.

But look here. The student wasn’t being checked out as an auditor. The student was only being checked out on Itsa.

Further, the action of auditing as a whole is so easy to an instructor who is an expert auditor that he fails to take it apart for instruction.

If I say the following, it will look ridiculous and you’ll get the point better: The student is up to pass TR 0. The Instructor on check out looks the student over and says „You flunked the test.“ The student says „Why?“ The Instructor says „You didn’t take the Class VI actions to clear the pc of all his GPMs.“ All right, we can all see that that would be silly. But Instructors do just that daily, though on a narrower band.

The Instructor puts in additives. As an expert auditor it seems natural to him to say „You flunked your test on Itsa because you never acknowledged the pc.“ You get the point. This really is as crazy wide as the ridiculous example above. What does Ack have to do with Itsa? Nothing!

Because the Instructor is an expert auditor, auditing has ceased to have parts and is all one chunk. Okay. A good auditor regards it that way. But the poor student can’t grasp any of the pieces because the whole chunk is being demanded.

What’s Itsa? It’s Listen. Can the student listen? Okay, he can listen but the expert says, „He didn’t get 15 divisions of TA per hour.“ On the what? „On the meter of course.“ What meter? That’s Level II and Itsa is Level 0. „Yes,“ the expert protests, „but the pc didn’t get any better!“ Okay, so what pc is supposed to get better at Level 0. If they do it’s an accident, usually. Now does this student pass? „No! He can’t even look at the pc!“ Well, that’s TR 0 of Level I. „But he’s got to look like an auditor!“ How can he? An auditor has to get through a comm course before you can really call him that. „Okay, I’ll drop my standards…. „ the expert begins. Hell no, expert. You better pick up your standards for each Level and for each small part of auditing.

What’s it say at Level 0? „It says ‘Listen’.“ Okay, then, damn it, when the student is able to sit and listen and not shut a pc down with yak, the student passes. „And the meter?“ You better not let me catch you teaching meters at Level 0.

And so it goes right on up through the Levels and the bits within the Levels.

By making Itsa mysterious and tough, by adding big new standards to it like TA and Ack you only succeed in never teaching the student Itsa! So he goes on up and at Level IV audits like a bum. Can’t control a pc. Can’t meter, nothing.

So the expert tries to make a student do Class VI auditing the first day and the student is never trained to do any auditing at Level 0.

This nonsense repeated at Level I (by adding a meter, by purist flunking „because the pc couldn’t handle an ARC Break“) and repeated again at Level II („because the pc couldn’t assess“) and at Level III etc. etc.

Well, if you add things all the time out of sequence and demand things the student has not yet reached the student winds up in a ball of confusion like the cat getting into the yarn.

So we’re not instructing. We’re preventing a clear view of the parts of auditing by adding higher level standards and actions to lower level activities.

This consumes time. It makes a mess.

The new HCA always tries to teach his group a whole HCA course his first evening home. Well, that’s no reason seasoned veterans have to do it in our courses.

If you never let a student learn Level 0 because he’s flunked unless he does Level VI first, people will stay on courses forever and we’ll have no auditors.

Instructors must teach not out of their OWN expertise but out of the text book expected actions in the Level the student is being trained in. To go above that level like assessment in Level II or Ack and meters at Level 0 is to deny the student any clean view of what he’s expected to do. And if he never learns the parts, he’ll never do the whole.

And that’s all that’s wrong with our instruction or our instructors. As expert auditors they cease to view the part the student must know as itself and do not train and pass the student upon it.

Instead they confuse the student by demanding more than the part being learned.

Instruction is done on a gradient scale. Learn each part well by itself. And only then can assembly of parts occur into what we want — a well trained student.

This is not lowering any standards. It’s raising them on all training.

The other side of the picture, theory, suffers because of a habit. The habit is all one’s years of formal schooling where this mistake is the whole way of life.

If the student knows the words, the theory instructor assumes he knows the tune.

It will never do a student any good at all to know some facts. The student is expected only to use facts.

It is so easy to confront thought and so hard to confront action that the Instructor often complacently lets the student mouth words, ideas that mean nothing to the student.

ALL THEORY CHECKOUTS MUST CONSULT THE STUDENT’S UNDERSTANDING.

If they don’t, they’re useless and will ARC Break the student eventually.

Course natter stems entirely from the students’ non-comprehension of words and data.

While this can be cured by auditing, why audit it all the time when you can prevent it in the first place by adequate theory checkout?

There are two phenomena here.

When a student misses understanding a word, the section right after that word is a blank in his memory. You can always trace back to the word just before the blank, get it understood and find miraculously that the former blank area is not now blank in the bulletin. The above is pure magic.

The second phenomenon is the overt cycle which follows a misunderstood word. When a word is not grasped, the student then goes into a non-comprehension (blankness) of things immediately after. This is followed by the student’s solution for the blank condition which is to individuate from it — separate self from it. Now being something else than the blank area, the student commits overts against the more general area. These overts, of course, are followed by restraining himself from committing overts. This pulls flows toward the person and makes the person crave motivators. This is followed by various mental and physical conditions and by various complaints, fault-finding and look-what-you-did-to-me. This justifies a departure, a blow.

But the system of education, frowning on blows as it does, causes the student to really withdraw self from the study subject (whatever he was studying) and set up in its place a circuit which can receive and give back sentences and phrases.

We now have „the quick student who somehow never applies what he learns“.

The specific phenomena then is that a student can study some words and give them back and yet be no participant to the action. The student gets A+ on exams but can’t apply the data.

The thoroughly dull student is just stuck in the non-comprehend blankness following some misunderstood word.

The „very bright“ student who yet can’t use the data isn’t there at all. He has long since ceased to confront the subject matter or the subject.

The cure for either of these conditions of „bright non-comprehension“ or „dull“ is to find the missing word.

But these conditions can be prevented by not letting the student go beyond the missed word without grasping its meaning. And that is the duty of the Theory Instructor.

Giving a bulletin or tape check by seeing if it can be quoted or paraphrased proves exactly nothing. This will not guarantee that the student knows the data or can use or apply it nor even guarantees that the student is there. Neither the „bright“ student nor the „dull“ student (both suf­fering from the same malady) will benefit from such an examination.

So examining by seeing if somebody „knows“ the text and can quote or paraphrase it is completely false and must not be done.

Correct examination is done only by making the person being tested answer

(a) The meanings of the words (re-defining the words used in his own words and demonstrating their use in his own made up sentences), and

(b) Demonstrating how the data is used.

The examiner need not do a Clay Table audit just to get a student to pass. But the exam­iner can ask what the words mean. And the examiner can ask for examples of action or applica­tion.

„What is this HCO Bulletin’s first section?“ is about as dull as one can get. „What are the rules given about…..?“ is a question I would never bother to ask. Neither of these tell the ex­aminer whether he has the bright non-applier or the dull student before him. Such questions just beg for natter and course blows.

I would go over the first paragraph of any material I was examining a student on and pick out some uncommon words. I’d ask the student to define each and demonstrate its use in a made up sentence and flunk the first „Well… er… let me see…“ and that would be the end of that check out. I wouldn’t pick out only Scientologese. I’d pick out words that weren’t too ordinary such as „benefit“ „permissive“ „calculated“ as well as „engram“.

Students I was personally examining would begin to get a hunted look and carry dictionaries - BUT THEY WOULDN’T BEGIN TO NATTER OR GET SICK OR BLOW. AND THEY’D USE WHAT THEY LEARNED.

Above all, I myself would be sure I knew what the words meant before I started to examine.

Dealing with new technology and the necessity to have things named, we especially need to be alert.

Before you curse our terms, remember that a lack of terms to describe phenomena can be twice as incomprehensible as having involved terms that at least can be understood eventually.

We do awfully well, really, better than any other science or subject. We lack a dictionary but we can remedy that.

But to continue with how one should examine, when the student had the words, I’d demand the music. What tune do these words play?

I’d say „All right, what use is this bulletin (or tape) to you?“ Questions like, „Now this rule here about not letting pcs eat candy while being audited, how come there’d be such a rule?“ And if the student couldn’t imagine why, I’d go back to the words just ahead of that rule and find the one he hadn’t grasped.

I’d ask „What are the commands of 8C?“ And when the student gave them, I’d still have the task of satisfying myself that the student understood why those were the commands. I’d ask „How come?“ after he’d given me the commands. Or „What are you going to do with these?“ „Audit a pc with them“ he might say. I’d say, „Well, why these commands?“

But if the student wasn’t up to the point of study where knowing why he used those com­mands was not part of his materials, I wouldn’t ask. For all the data about not examining above level applies very severely to Theory Check out as well as to Practical and general Instruction.

I might also have a Clay Table beside my examiner’s desk (and certainly would have if I were an HCO hat checker, to which all this data also applies) and use it to have students show me they knew the words and ideas.

Theory often says „Well, they take care of all that in Practical.“ Oh no they don’t. When you have a Theory Section that believes that, Practical can’t function at all.

Practical goes through the simple motions. Theory covers why one goes through the motions.

I don’t think I have to beat this to death for you.

You’ve got it.

[Modified by HCO PL 4 October 1964 (reissued 21 May 1967), Theory Checkout Data, page 181.]