Final exam

Re Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn: I couldn’t get through all of Fortress of Solitude, though there’s some brilliant writing in it, and haven’t read anything else of his. But my estimate of Lethem zoomed upward several years ago when someone I know who met him on one occasion subsequently reported that he said he’d read all of Iris Murdoch’s novels. This is double hearsay or something, so take with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.

Nice post. I am probably a lot younger than you and I just realized how great in-class examinations can be. First, they are closed book and closed notes. Students can only bring a 3 x 5 index card to class. Second, it renders online paper mills useless. Google cannot save you. You cannot simply cut and paste from one page to another. Third, you really have to know the material. Moreover, given the way I set my exams up, you have to be creative in your analysis. Fourth, you have to go back and read those areas of the assigned reading material that you neglected earlier.

Given the existence of the “The Shadow Scholar,” I will continue to give in-class examinations.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Am I the only one worried about security and integrity? When you give a take-home exam, how do you know who is actually writing the essays?

Usually a take home exam has much more tightly focussed question(s) and shorter, stricter length requirements, so the issue is not filling the length or coming up with ideas about what to argue but instead making careful choices about how you make your argument. Give me a well designed take home over an open-ended loosey-goosey essay assignment any day.

My only problem with take-homes: students often focus on them to the detriment of their other courses. Things must vary with each school’s end-of-semester practices and rules (last due date for papers in a course with a final or without a final; self-scheduled exams; scheduled finals; the amount of time between last day of classes and first day of scheduled exams). But where I teach, students obsess over take-homes precisely because they anticipate that the professor will read their essays with the same high standards set for their regular papers. It’s possible that your students produced such good essays for you at the expense of preparing properly for their Chemistry or French exams, to be held the day after their take-home for you was due.
A compromise I’ve arrived at: give students the prompts/questions ahead of time, but have them actually write their essay(s) in the regularly scheduled (or self-scheduled) exam time. Let them bring books to the exam.
The prospect of this is enough to encourage them to keep up with the readings during the semester (which makes for better class discussions, their better learning overall — the purpose of even giving a final in a literature course, from my point of view), and their essays are more likely to be thoughtful and interesting than if they were hit with prompts/questions only as they sat down to take the test.
Handwriting is another problem….

I usually have take-home essay exams for my senior-level classes and in-class essay exams (with some short answers too) for my lower-level classes. But for the in-class essay exams, I distribute the possible essay questions a week beforehand. The students can’t bring in notes, but they know exactly what they have to prepare. Out of (say) 5 possible essays, 3 will appear on the exam, and they have to write on 2 out of the three. I’ve been pretty happy with the way this has worked. I think it helps the students with learning the material as they prepare for the exam.

On Lethem–I didn’t hate Motherless Brooklyn, but wasn’t crazy about it either. In some ways, Lethem is the archetype of the modern, “literary” writer. Just too much going on there. A noir with a Tourette’s sufferer as protagonist? OK . . . As an earlier commentator said, I found Fortress of Solitude completely unreadable. (It was the only book I had on a work trip, and I stopped reading maybe 50 pages in. Maybe it gets better after that.) I think that there is a very limited number of readers who find him readable/enjoyable.

I too was outraged by that Birkerts review–which led to what will probably be my only appearance in the paper of record:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/books/l-the-l-word-001678.html

Glad to see you teaching PKD in this context, Michael–I found that book almost unbearably moving, rereading it not so long ago….

Number Three @16
To clarify my earlier comment, unlike you I didn’t find The Fortress of Solitude completely unreadable — I didn’t finish it but I got about halfway through, perhaps a bit more. Part of my problem with it was that the pop culture context — comic books, the particular music involved, etc. — just didn’t interest me that much. And after a while the characters lost their hold on me somewhat. But there are one or two passages or phrases — one in particular — that have stuck with me b/c they were so original and striking. And I think the friendship between the two boys, the white kid (and perhaps Lethem alter ego) and the African-American kid (both of whom are followed into adulthood), is quite well done.

Berube – good for you! I always preferred papers to in-class exams when I was an undergrad, and even more so when I became a TA.

In the end, what kills the in-class exam for me is the artificiality of the exercise; you’re teaching kids a skill they will use nowhere else. And lest anyone think I’m suggesting some crass professional training ethos, I think it holds for academics/intellectual life in general. When is it a good thing for people to avoid consulting sources or notes (when we desperately want them to do it and they don’t nearly as much as they need to) – given that scholars rely on their research library/skills all the time? When do we actually require memorization, analysis, and grasp on the material in a time-limited, closed-book context? Why make mulling over an idea over time, editing and refining an argument difficult if not impossible?

If grace under fire is the purpose of the exercise, oral exams make more sense, and even we at least apply the correct standards for extemporaneous thought there.

In the end, what kills the in-class exam for me is the artificiality of the exercise; you’re teaching kids a skill they will use nowhere else.

Writing fast and efficiently is necessary in journalism and useful for lawyers.

The fact that debate over the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of exam continue after decades (centuries?) is surely proof that there is no one best method of assessment and that a continually changing variety of courses with a variety of assessment methods, some chosen capriciously and some with deliberation, is the proper collection of paths.

I like in-class essay exams. Always have, as a student and as faculty. I was talking to a colleague about this the other day, and he asked why, because the quality of work on a take-home is so much better.

That’s true, but they measure different things. One is thinking on one’s feet, based on having really learnt a lot and internalized it. The other is slower thinking and composing. Both are good, and both should be assessed, I think. But in-class exams also give an edge to the students who really have been paying attention to how things fit together AND have been studying. Only about 40% of my course grades are based on an in-class midterm and final, but they really help to separate the very good from the ok.

Where I find the difficulties is getting students to understand that they have to be able to learn enough to talk about things with specific examples…

Hmmm.

25: It’s an exercise, though, not a method. Football players don’t lift weights on the field. Being able to recall what you know in a hurry, and as far as that goes, being able to fudge, are essential skills in a lot of situations. And various sorts of people are expected to have immediate recall of essential information — e.g. MDs.

Oral exams would be even more like this aspect of real life, but they’re too labor-intensive in examiners.

I’ve only read Chronic City and some of Lethem’s essays in the New York Times (which is why I gave the novel a try, as from the reviews it sounded unpromising), and I’m pretty sure there was a Papaya Czar in that too, though I might have been able to guess it was the Lethem by process of elimination, only because of useless cultural capital.

I don’t like either the Shelley or the Atwood as attempts at gender equity, if that’s what they are, but I can’t think of anything better (the Atwood is too obviously a painful attempt to write about boys for a change, and I don’t see why should “women’s issues” equal “childbirth”). Never Let Me Go seems too English, and The Children of Men is an old person’s book, so likely neither of them would work well, and I’m not sure either is about disability. A.S. Byatt and Rebecca Goldstein both have books about mental disability (A Whistling Woman and Properties of Light) that might also not work well.

@14

In The Sound and the Fury, Martian Time-Slip, and Curious Incident, intellectual disability actually warps the texture of the narrative in fascinating ways—going all the way back to how Don Quixote’s “madness,” his inability to distinguish fiction from reality, actually produces (in Book II) a world in which the Don’s fiction has become reality. Whereas the disability in Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s) seems more ornamental; it doesn’t produce a fundamentally different kind of narrative technique altogether, just a string of tics and outbursts in an otherwise conventional novel. On the other hand, it offers some fun with metonymy, and a link between intellectual disability and the detective genre (Curious Incident, Monk), so there’s that.

What’s funny is that, as a person with Tourette’s, I actually thought Lethem (or, at least, his protagonist) was making a bit too much of the broad psychological effects of Tourette’s. All of that stuff about how his “Tourette’s brain” caused him to view this or that situation in this or that way rang false, since in reality Tourette’s is just a highly specific and uninteresting set of compulsions without broader consequences for personality or worldview. Granted, the line between Tourette’s and OCD is often a blurred one, and in the more OCD-ish stretches of my Tourette’s, I have had experiences that are a lot like the ones Essrog attributes to his “Tourette’s brain.” But still, it felt a bit too much like an attempt to make psychologically interesting an ailment so specific and boring that it doesn’t feel right to call it an “intellectual disability” at all — it feels more analogous to, say, phantom limb pain than to other psychological disorders. (You often feel a spontaneous need to perform certain motions or make certain sounds, and that need feels almost exactly like the need to breathe that you would feel after holding your breath for a while. That’s it. No distortions of perception, thought, etc., not even the very mild ones Lethem includes in his attempt to make Tourette’s interesting in a literary sense.)

I did really enjoy the novel, though. Except for its obvious applications as a plot device, the Tourette’s felt very superfluous, just a bit of surface-level quirkiness, like naming your protagonist “Lionel Essrog.” It’s a entertaining and well-written book, but not really one that’s about “intellectual disability,” at least not in any interesting or insightful way.

(This post is not really on topic but I hope someone out there finds it interesting enough to warrant its inclusion.)

@31 and @35. My favorite example is Homer. What most interests me, though, is the postmodernist embrace of a Homer or Shakespeare once they’re recognized to be up to those “postmodernist” things. In Homer’s case, the interest in oral traditions of poetry prompts comparisons to the internet and “flat worlds” (often naively: only classicists seem interested in exploring the social structures and structures of power that “authorize” traditional oral texts, the ways “postmodernist” moves need not be all that “subversive”).

Back to Michael @29: the main disability issue that I worry I don’t adequately address is the student with a dyslexia or some other condition (including being on certain medications — god, are students medicated these days) that means they need more time for tests than the five-minutes I’ve allotted for a quiz or for a class hour test or two-and-a-half hour final. (Most testing I do is in language classes.) Students can always let me know if they need extra time (I encourage them to do so), or can alert me via the dean’s office, but I suspect many, especially if their conditions is relatively mild, do not.

I’ve read about half the novels on the list, and I found the identification surprisingly difficult – I’m quite astonished at how many of the quotes wouldn’t be so out of place in one of the other novels. The writting style sometimes helps (and many of the writers on the list have very distinctive prose styles), but even that doesn’t always help.

*****

When I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, I felt it was running against a paradox. A mainstream novel is usually about the characters’ thoughts and motivations, and so writing one is a difficult exercize in what the autism researchers call “theory of mind”[*] If the fictional pretense is that the narrator has an autistic spectrum condition, the real author can end up talking to the presumed reader over the head of fictional narrator. You might compare Dog in the Night-time to books where the author really has an autistic spectrum diagnosis (e.g. Rich Shull, Temple Grandin, etc.)

I had decided last summer, with some trepidation, to teach a good chunk of the course by working out some of the ideas for my next book.
As a retired scientist it astounds me that new ideas should be discouraged in a classroom.

In my favorite undergraduate course the materials were in manuscript because it was a draft which upended the stodgy while emphasizing the new experimental methods. In graduate school, the intellectually robust professors shared the fields they were creating while incidentally writing textbooks.

Wouldn’t you enjoy being a Princeton student of Krugman’s as he is trying out his new intro Economics book? Isn’t that what universities are for?

Just as addenda to the topic of exams, in science they are usually short answer. A few lines of calculation or a chemical diagram require 15 minutes of cogitation. Tests of reasoning based on a substantial body of knowledge can be open book and often are.

Are some of the questions being raised here really about performance, and about different kinds of performance? A football player works out to play well in a given game, and a musician practices in order to perform well in a given concert — even if they’ll never again play football or the cello after they’ve graduated. Students are learning to analyze, to think creatively, to write well, to express themselves orally, and to do all these things in a variety of contexts (including those where they have to work very quickly, even improvise on the spot) in order to perform well in some context or other not just now (a paper, an oral presentation, an exam) but in the future, when many of the skills they are learning “just for a course” really will be needed. Each and every course can’t address the whole range of future performances for which we are hoping to prepare the students in our courses. We can only hope that four years of liberal arts courses, in a well-designed, larger curriculum help most individual students find their own way. (Hence my refusal to dismiss “outcomes assessment,” insofar as it demands that we attend seriously to our larger goals as we construct the outline of those four years; hence also my disdain for any “checkbox” approach to outcomes assessment.)

Back to football players and musicians, and apart from the many ways I actually believe their more obvious goal of performance could and should enrich our ways of thinking about the standard academic arena: the athlete or musician doesn’t just practice for an upcoming performance. The lonely hours of work take each into some intense and lively place, known only to him or her (just as reading and writing take the student). And each is also dedicated to fellows — teammates, fellows in a quartet or chorus or orchestra. I wish students in a course (certainly a small seminar) more often appreciated that they make the course work, and that we their teachers are little different from coaches or conductors.

Just as addenda to the topic of exams, in science they are usually short answer.

True as stated, but with many exceptions. Sussex University ran a “Chemistry by Thesis” undergraduate degree for years, very successfully, for a few strong students each year. After the first year, attendance at courses was optional, and the bulk of the whole degree was assessed from a thesis. Sadly, it had to be cancelled for insurance reasons.

SusanC @ 38: Thanks for checking the IDs! # 24, for example, is Flowers for Algernon but could have appeared, mutatis mutandis, in almost every other novel. As for Curious Incident and narrative irony (the question of whether Haddon is talking to us over Christopher’s head), a good comparison point is Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark, which has to resort to multiple narrators for exposition because Lou is unaware of important features of the narrative he’s in. Whereas Haddon quite cleverly solves this problem by way of another layer of texts, i.e., the discovery of his mother’s letters.

Peggy @ 40 — yeah, amazing, isn’t it? Hacker and Dreyfus think they’re complaining righteously about the fragmentation of the curriculum, and they’re really complaining that undergraduates are exposed to their professors’ ideas. As for me, my trepidation had to do with whether I could make it all intelligible to undergraduates, since some of it involves a bit of narrative theory and a bit of the history of intellectual disability.

I don’t see Oryx and Crake being about gender equity, but it certainly deals with rape and sex traffic. Of particular interest, this semester, was the line “or there were sex scandals: sex scandals always got the newscasters excited. For a while it was sports coaches and little boys; then there was a wave of adolescent girls locked in garages.” So at least we know what’s coming next.

Apologies for posting after in a previous thread offending Michael worse than intended, but thanks for the post and many of the comments. I happen to be scheduled to teach History of Math next term, with an enrolment of 80 (go budget cuts!) so I can really use the advice…

Any chance you could post the full syllabus for the class? I’d love to take a look at it.

And how about some more information on the book-in-progress?

Stephen @ 50 — those eight novels (and the NYTMag essay) are the syllabus, basically. As for the book, there’s a full-blown Sneak Preview available in this recently-published volume, chapter 29, “Narrative and Intellectual Disability.” And a shorter, post-it version of the general idea was published in PMLA 120.2 (2005): 568-76. An even shorter, one-sentence teaser can be found in the offhand reference to Don Quixote @ 14….

Michael Bérubé @52: Thanks!

What I find most terrifying is that I recognize all the Tarzan quotes. (It was grade school but I did get up to book 27 or so. . .)

Restrict students to 140 characters per answer. Like a tweet. Like this comment. A transferable skill.