The Exams Questionnaire

During the past three weeks, about 800 students have filled out a two-page questionnaire seeking undergraduate opinion on final examinations. A majority of the students said that they favored the present system's written, three-hour final. The term paper and the pre-announced question may be preferable for courses which attempt to teach a particular method of analytic thinking. But most courses at the College are oriented more toward conveying organized factual material; and in these courses, students would like to have a final examination.

This is not really an unexpected result, if only because most of the variations used at Harvard require considerably more work than studying for a regular exam. The fact that examinations take less work is not, however, the sort of thing one writes on a questionnaire. Other arguments justifying the present system appeared more often, and though they were perhaps no less unexpected than the overall result of the poll, they were a bit more disheartening. The written final, for example, was often defended primarily on the grounds that it prevents cheating. And an examination system with this as its rationale is starting off on the wrong foot.

Ideally, an exam should teach as well as test. A professor must unroll a course week by week during the term, and there is not always time to point out all the relationships between topics covered several months apart. The problem is especially acute at Harvard, where many students do not attend all their lectures and therefore tend to miss the lecturer's efforts to fit individual works from the reading list into some over-all pattern. A skillfully devised examination question, however, can lead the student to assemble materials from all the different parts of a course while constructing a single, unified essay.

The theory of the ideal examination seems to bear little relation to the realities of examination practice. In answering the questionnaire, not more than half a dozen students mentioned the teaching function of exams. Most of the students favoring the present system emphasized benefits arising from reading-period preparation, rather than the actual process of examination writing. Some felt that without the threat of an examination, they would never have completed the reading list. For others, last-minute studying helped draw together the various materials covered during the term. Those pursuing the second line of reasoning rarely mentioned that the experience might be furthered in the examination hall. They depicted review work during reading period as a satisfying--though rigorous--discipline; the actual exam was often described as simply a chore, and certainly not an educational tool.

Regardless of how skillfully exam questions have been devised, no one learns anything when he is bored. Examinations would surely teach more if the questions on them were more interesting. The examinations poll asked for the best single question the student had ever been given on a three-hour exam. Two came up repeatedly: a chemistry question asking the student to make up an extra-credit problem which only ten per cent of the class would be able to answer, and an English question asking the student to characterize himself in the style of different authors studied during the term. Both these are "trick" questions, and there is certainly no reason why every question on an examination should be quite so imaginative. But both questions are also educational, because they force the student to think. They require him to translate his arguments and facts into a new context. It is doubtful that a student has learned all he can from a course if he cannot perform, or be led to perform, this sort of operation. A good examination question can suggest how.

A college which encourages this sort of thinking in its undergraduates is not only giving worth-while examinations, it is acting consistently with the principles of a "General," liberal arts education. These principles have always stressed the use, rather than the accumulation, of information; and the final examination, if it is to be an integral part of the educational process, should conform to the principles behind that process.