Exit Exams

As January moves on and hordes of the conscientious descend on Lamont and Radcliffe Libraries, it is worth halting the grind to consider the purpose of examinations. At least 6 courses were prominent in their absence from the exam schedule, and the fact of alternate term papers in these courses sheds some relevant light on the question.

The six courses--English 163 and 175, Soc Sci 134, Government 114 and 155a, and Music 124--all offer long papers as either optional or required replacements for the standard three-hour exam.

It has been argued that the exam is an irreplaceable part of the lecture-and-syllabus system. Life itself, so the argument runs, is an endless succession of crises in which the educated man is called upon to marshal and organize his knowledge on short notice. Certainly in a course aimed toward the assimiliation of large quantities of factual or semi-factual data, the exam is a successful approximation of such a crisis.

The first problem raised by such a procedure is the presence of variables exerting an undue influence on the student's performance. The weather, the digestion of the last meal, a strong or weak reaction to sudden tension, or even the way a girl sounded on the phone last night--all these can play a huge role in the quality of work produced on an exam.

Second, and more important, is the limitation imposed by the three-hour exam on creative and original thought. Too often it is the student's retentive ability and not his grasp of subject matter that is tested. If the aim of a course is intelligent and independent thought on a given subject, then this should be the quantity tested, not, as so often happens, memory or blind luck in spotty preparation.

Whatever the summary assignment of a course may be, it should require not only retention but synthesis as well. Simple police activity can be reserved for section quizzes that keep pace with the assigned reading, and should not take up so large a measure of the summary project. That project can range from an exam to an openbook or take-home test, to a pre-assigned exam topic or even the term paper.

The open-book and take-home systems share the important feature of synthesis--a situation in which the student, with permission to consult his sources, must still draw together his material and produce a comprehensive essay. A pre-assigned topic assumes that, even with foreknowledge, the assignment is sufficiently difficult to demand creative thought while allowing a student to shape and direct his pre-exam studying. This system simply gives more time to the summary work, spreading the synthesis over weeks instead of 180 minutes.

The term paper is of all these alternatives best adapted to a sustained effort on independent work. If the topic is narrow, the student must demonstrate sufficient grasp of the wider range of the course to treat intelligently one aspect of it. If the broad synthesis itself is assigned, the student has accomplished essentially the same things that he would on an exam, but with the elimination of the irrelevant variables.

The traditional final exam produces a fundamentally passive attitude in the student; he is given a set of questions, and told to respond to them. Normally this response will take the form of pre-digested answers as the lecturer offered them. The six courses which this term have departed from standard procedure are demanding a far more active and rigorous job from their participants.