‘Bye-Bye, Blue Books?’

A friend has just called my attention to a short report in the most recent (July-August 2010) issue of Harvard Magazine entitled, “Bye-bye, Blue Books?” The hook for the piece is the fact that on May 11 the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences (FAS) formally abolished the long-standing procedure in which a final examination is scheduled for each FAS course unless the instructor notifies the Registrar that no examination will be required. 

Starting next fall, this traditional default (scheduling a final examination) will be replaced by a new default—that no examination will be scheduled for a course unless the instructor formally notifies the Registrar that a final will be required. This reverses an educational policy that is probably more than a century old. It is apparently the result of the realization that few current Harvard courses in fact require their students to “sit” for finals—”of 1,137 undergraduate-level courses this spring term, 259 scheduled finals.” It seems that most instructors now require long-term papers rather than examinations as final assessment exercises. The examless approach is, moreover, apparently concentrated in the humanities and soft social sciences. The dean of undergraduate education is quoted as saying that “the sciences and quantitative social sciences were most likely to end courses with finals.”

But it seems that some Harvard faculty members expressed concerns about the new default situation at the May 11 meeting. One English professor worried that “perhaps nothing beyond the paper itself was being used to evaluate what students were learning.” All of this is in a context in which many humanities departments have abandoned exit general examinations for their majors. The professor went on to ask, “How are we assessing students?” Given “grade compression” (that is, grade inflation, a real problem at Harvard), “it became difficult to distinguish exceptional from ordinary work in the humanities,” and this constitutes a dangerous trend “to examine less and less and less and less.” Another faculty member explained that one reason the faculty were giving fewer examinations was that since the onset of serious budget cutting, professors have to “proctor” (Harvard for “supervise”) their own exams instead of hiring grad students for the purpose. Imagine! Still another professor suggested that humanities departments probably should decide how many examined courses their concentrators (Harvard for “majors”) should take.

I should confess right now that I do not offer examinations in my normal courses (although I did in a very large lecture course that I recently co-taught). My experience is that the combination of in-class discussion (in a small to moderate sized course) plus a research term paper is a better learning experience for my students, although the approach is not so easy to manage if the teacher wants to keep the students doing the reading and coming to class without the club of an examination to coerce them. I have rarely learned anything from grading an examination, but I usually learn from working through successive drafts and the final versions of student term papers. I learned to play the essay examination game pretty quickly as an undergraduate, and I have never since had much respect for it as a learning experience. I assume many of my colleagues have abandoned examinations for similar reasons, though so far as I know Harvard has not yet tried to collect evidence on faculty motivations.

But there is a larger and more important question than how many finals are being given at Harvard or elsewhere—what and how well have students learned over the course of their undergraduate experience? Course grades, however they are arrived at, are simply one indication of what the student has learned in a particular course. General examinations are a method of determining what students in a particular field of concentration have learned, usually over their last two years in college. I suspect that they are being abandoned at Harvard because they were poorly constructed, as they are in many institutions (mine included). But surely something needs to be done to assess content knowledge in the field of the student’s primary interest. Some institutions offer the option of senior research theses (they are optional at Harvard and required at Princeton, for instance), and these are certainly an important indication of student analytical skill and content knowledge. Other institutions have other capstone exercises, including senior seminars.

I think the point is that evaluating coursework is only one, and in my judgment, not a very important measure of student learning. We need to assess larger and longer patterns of learning in order to see what value we are adding to student learning—and to adapt our pedagogy and curriculum to what we learn. There has recently been a lot of attention to new technologies for such assessment, the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the National Survey of Student Engagement being two of the most prominent examples. My advice to colleagues at Harvard, and to all colleagues, would be to worry more about developing credible methods of assessing overall student learning outcomes. Exams and grades are means, not ends.