If you are a highschool or college student, when was the last time you took an academic test? Probably last week. And what are you doing now? Probably reviewing for a test. If you are a highschool or college professor, what are you doing now? Probably preparing or marking a test. I will tell you outright, I think this near-ubiquitous pedagogic crutch a feeble procedure and a misuse of time.
What is it that a highschool aims to teach? It is no revolutionary thing to say that it aims to train up strong, active minds which take delight in truth and beauty, and in the process introduce them to some of the most important ideas, names, languages, and literature that nourish our cultural discourse. Young minds may be brilliant or may be dumb, but nearly all of them are capable of forming some attachment, some love, to a science, to a period of history, or to an author. This sort of intellectual desire ought to be encouraged wherever it is found, and allowed to flourish. Some day it may become a real academic excellence; perhaps it may lead to related studies; more than likely the pure experience of intellectual love will prepare the student to throw the weight of his mature mind into an honourable and serious labour, political or academic (and I mean political in the largest sense of the word).
How does the well-meaning test assist this purpose? Generally speaking, it forces a student to review the material he has copied down from the lectures and his textbook; in college, it even forces him to think independently on the meaning and significance of the material. Without a test, without the incentive of a good grade and the embarrassment of a bad one, most students wouldn't give a second thought to the material. Even the best of them must be led gently but firmly towards knowledge.
Yet precisely what command of knowledge does a test demand? To be specific, memorized facts and regurgitated analysis. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with regurgitated material. Were it not for regurgitated food, in fact, the worldwide bird population would have died off shortly after the fifth day of creation, for lack of means to feed the chicks. However, it is an essential point of regurgitation that the food doesn't stay in the belly of the parent, but is cast into the gullet of the chick, or in our case, the pages of the bluebook. Regurgitated information does not nourish the mind. Information from one science does not shape the information of another. All is kept tightly preserved in boxes of the memory labeled 'upcoming exam'.
The existence of mid-terms in college is hard enough. At the Academy, the highschool history students take an exam almost once every two weeks. These are usually preceded by a review day, where the professor quizzes the students and fields their questions. The year is split into three terms, such that in each term, the children take several miniature tests and a comprehensive exam at the end. The effect on most of these students I conceive to be a tendency to forget what was learned in all previous terms but the present, and I observe the same in college, that very few remember what they studied so hard for in previous semesters. The best of them perhaps remember in the spring what they learned in the fall.
Now, this is not in itself problematic. Isn't the aim of education not a memory for facts (and here I included regurgitated analysis in my definition of 'fact'), but appreciation of principles, and a delight in knowledge? Yes indeed, but facts are a means to that knowledge. Constant testing constantly empties out those facts and restarts the new term with new facts, so that no comprehensive idea is built up. Any enlargement of the mind is accidental and infrequent.
I suggest we learn a lesson from England, and administrate highschool tests far less often, perhaps once a year, for several reasons:
1) The difficulty of holding in the memory such a vast volume of facts forces the student to develop a facility for ordering his acquired facts according to principles, for using parts of other studies to reinforce his memory of this one, and in general to cultivate precisely what we wish for.
2) The allegiance to GPA as a measure of intellectual success, and consequent cutting of corners and the habit of studying to the exam, diminishes, as does the opposite tendency to become inoculated against its authority. Believe me, the frightful difficulty of a once-yearly exam creates near awe about it.
3) It frees up immense amounts of time both in class and out for both teacher and student, to get on with the business of learning. It doesn't at all preclude the potential to review past material from time to time, and even to take informal tests. In fact, a wise teacher will do so. But the mood of the review changes, from being servile to being liberal. I think this is the real meaning behind the contemporary concern that kids become 'stressed' and 'over-worried' at having to take so many exams.
In the meantime, kids can be tested in far more fruitful ways. There should be frequent competitions for prose and poetry memorization, for written essays, for artistic creativity, just as there already are in sports. Achievement shouldn't be mechanized and economized into a number or a letter. It should be honoured as a particular and glorious production of a thriving mind, just as it truly is in the adult world. There is very little competition in exams, because they are by nature private. But competitions of production are by nature public. And kids - especially the boys - are far more inspired by public honour than they are by private self-respect.
There are several counter-arguments that I haven't the time or space to recite or refute. I would also like to stress that nothing is further from my mind than lampooning the wisdom and the deliberate thoughtfulness of schools and professors who do administrate frequent exams. However, I state the general case as seems to me to complement a complete pedagogy, and I'd like you, my sweet reader, to comment on this and debate with me and the other readers. I know much of what I blog is obscure, but I've no doubt you have at least briefly thought about this particular issue before, it being so near to your heart, as it were.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
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2 comments:
Very well then, sir, since you so eloquently stake out what is the fairer of the positions, I will offer a few shots at it. One problem with the Grand Exam is its lack of precision. I know several young slackers who could (and do) breeze through any cumulative test, despite tuning out the majority of daily classes. The larger and more generally-themed the test, the more it admits and encourages bluffing. Would you make the yearly exam factual, a matter of nuts-and-bolts detail questions? And if so, might not the loss of the essay test (where constraints on time often make for cleaner, clearer, more concentrated expressions of key ideas) be a loss worth lamenting?
One further question, about how to foster that love for some area of study that you describe so beautifully as the moment of success for any student. The difficulty seems to me to lie in what you yourself note, that attachment requires the second thoughts that most students will not bestow on a serious subject without encouragement. Before the subject has become a love of theirs, it is only the burdensome idea of someone else. They need to be told where to find something they are not looking for. The job of teacher is to hold the match against the wick long enough for the flame to catch, even relighting it a few times. Granted that tests are burdensome, what methods do you find effective for fostering the attention and diligence that are preliminary to real flame? Does competition cover all the subjects you would need to encourage?
I think the answer to your first argument is a simple administrative one. The usual American calendar would have to be changed. At the moment we have no more than a single 'reading day' which is only a chance to sleep in for once, and then we have several exams all piled into one another. Far better to leave a week, if not two, between the last class and the first exam, and then spread them out over a couple weeks. This way the students will have time to review the material, details and all, and the school will have the time to administrate comprehensive exams, which will involve both questions of detail and essays. And remember, one doesn't have to test all the details to force study of them; the mere possibility of anything at all turning up is a sufficient threat.
As to your second, which is really an enlarged and philosophical version of the first, the metaphor of the match and the wick delights me.
But I'm not convinced the steady dripping of tests and quizzes into a GPA is an effective discipline, especially for boys. As I argued, I think it tends to intellectual indiscipline.
And consider how exams are used these days, and consider how they ceaselessly proliferate. They have become what I called a 'pedagogic crutch.' In many schools they are now the only significant means of fostering the attention and diligence you show to be necessary. There are a multitude of means, all of them more organic than the test. I mentioned competition because it is so seldom used. But there is the encouragement of parents (and what should be more frequent, the headmaster writing letters to parents discussing their children's faults and merits); there is the occasional graded research paper; there is the dignified culture of liberal learning, best fed by pious confessional Christianity; and there is, primarily, the daily example, exhortation, and lecture of the teacher in the classroom. We're touching on the vast subject of the total administration of a school.
Also, keep in mind that few, if any, highschool students will burn for knowledge in every subject. As long as the culture and the discipline I have outlined exist, those who have any capacity and virtue will snatch at least at something. Those who don't shouldn't be going to highschool.
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