As the end of December rolls around and the task of finding an empty room in the Humanities Quadrangle gets progressively more fraught, the binary between STEM and Humanities students is replaced by another dichotomy — between friends with final papers and those with final exams.
As someone whose final season has often been split between these two modes, I’ve been grateful for the respite this gives me. Instead of having to write 10 pages a day during reading week like many history majors I know, or studying for three physics exams at the same time, I’ve been lucky to toggle between studying and writing. And even so, as I look back upon my Yale education as a senior, I wish that more of my classes had final exams.
As a Humanities major, a little more than half my classes relied only on final term papers to comprehensively test my learning throughout the semester. This is ostensibly because humanities classes are less about “what” you know than how you’ve come to know it. They’re more about learning to think than about equipping you with a set of facts to think about. To those pedagogical arguments, I say “you are not worth the dust the rude wind blows in your face.”
That’s a joke. It is also a line from King Lear. I am confident that most English majors who have taken a Shakespeare class would still be unable to identify it.
As someone whose school operated under a curriculum wherein every class had a final exam — the International General Certificate of Secondary Education and the International Baccalaureate — I can personally corroborate the research that revising for a final exam is an invaluable tool for long-term retrieval. I can still quote lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” I can still speak intelligently about the role of the HMS Dreadnought in the Anglo-German naval arms race.
During my first year of college, I took a class on “Tragedy in European Literature.” I probably can’t name half the authors on that syllabus. That is allegedly no cause for concern; I am supposed to be satisfied with the paltry consolation that the class made me a “better thinker,” that it sharpened my tools of critical analysis. What use are tools if you have nothing to build with them? It is far more rewarding to remember the sweep of a literary tradition than to vaguely recall that my final paper had something to do with heroism, decolonization and flies.
To say you have read “The Brothers Karamazov” but forget Smerdyakov is a travesty. To say you have studied modern philosophy yet remain unable to articulate Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason two months after the class ends is an unmitigated disaster.
When I advocate for all Humanities classes to have final exams, I do not mean these should replace final papers — or even that they should be more important than them. As college students, our academic mettle should be tested more by the quality of our original scholarship than the length of our TA-pandering regurgitations. Even so, having a basic comprehension exam at the end of the semester, one that simply requires students to revisit major readings or major passages from the semester and answer short questions about them will only buttress these analytical skills with fodder for the memory. There’s a reason that Directed Studies has both final exams and final papers.
To the critics who say that exams will only add to a Yale student’s untenable workload, I suggest the following: make these exams elementary in difficulty and make them account for less than 20 percent of the grade. Design them such that failing the exam does not mean failing the class. Rather, it would only preclude one from getting a top grade. Ask questions as simple as “Discuss how any three of the authors we have read this semester offer differing accounts of the mundane and prosaic,” or even “Where did the Indian revolution of 1857 begin, and how did it spread?” Lavish students with generous partial credit. I am not asking for final exams that burden and encumber, but ones that remind students just how much they have read and learned.
Let this logic be extended to weekly quizzes too. Too many students are comfortable sauntering into class without having so much as glanced at the reading, with the confidence that their “piggybacks rides,” their attempts to “complicate and problematize” and their insistence that the first page of the introduction was “interesting” will earn them a participation grade. Begin each seminar with a 10 minute quiz, asking only three basic questions about the reading’s broadest, most obvious arguments. Which temple does Ray take as the subject of his ecocritical analysis in “Ether?” Or “Which country’s oil production does Luka single out for its rapid increase in the past 25 years?” Use multiple choice questions, but create an incentive structure for students to have some passing familiarity with the reading material nonetheless.
To those who claim I am trying to turn Yale into Oxbridge, you have just given me another idea. Yalies should have comprehensive exams during their senior year. Not as measures of distinction but as measures of basic proficiency in their chosen major. But given that my interest in going to Myrtle Beach my senior spring will probably exceed my interest in revising organic chemistry from first-year, I am willing to relax that requirement.
In the rest of my propositions, though, I remain steadfast. To the obdurate skeptic, I say “Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” That is poetry. It is also a line from “As You Like It.” We would all do well to remember that. Exams will help in that endeavor.
PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.