Ah, midterms. As Boston’s final warm days disappear into a frigid and miserable winter, I’m holed up in my apartment attempting to catch up on seven weeks’ worth of reading, forced to decipher my own illegible notes from 9:30 a.m. lectures I don’t even remember attending. There’s no time to watch the crew teams race in the Head of the Charles Regatta, or spend time with parents and family during the Homecoming/ Parents’ Weekend, which Boston University, in its infinite wisdom, has once again scheduled for smack in the middle of the midterm exam period.
I’m exhausted, I’m running out of No-Doz pills and as I take a brief break from studying to write this column, I’m convinced that there’s no need for any of this misery otherwise known as midterms. In fact, in this fit of pre-exam rage, I’ve come to see midterms as nothing more than an evil tool used by professors to inflict pain upon students during one of the most depressing points of the semester.
Since the university registrar has once again left Veterans’ Day off our calendar, and with Thanksgiving still more than a month away, there’s little for BU students to look forward to at this point in the year. Sure Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend, but an extra hour of sleep isn’t much to celebrate in the midst of the cold and dreary exam days that lie ahead.
Midterm exams are a supposed attempt to measure our understanding of the concepts that professors have been lecturing about during the first half of the semester. Yet forcing students to cram massive amounts of information into their heads and then pour it out onto paper during a 90-minute class period can hardly be deemed an effective measure of student comprehension.
I wonder whether college exams are the product of a carefully coordinated conspiracy to keep the blue book publishers in business. After all, in this advanced technological age when computers have become more essential than underwear, why are we still being forced to write our answers in ugly little baby blue books? Some professors of larger classes complain about reading hundreds of essays on the same topic, but I find it hard to believe that any time is spared when they instead sit down and try to decipher eight pages of my dreadful handwriting.
I’ve been fortunate this semester to take several small College of Communication classes where there are no midterms, finals or written exams of any sort. Instead, student assessment is based on projects and class participation, so we are graded not on our ability to regurgitate information, but instead on the ability to implement concepts from the class into practical arguments and presentations.
Surely small, discussion-based classes are the ideal situation for both students and teachers. In small classes it becomes much easier for professors to get to know and interact with their students, thereby equipping them with a true means for evaluating a student’s performance during the semester. If a student can demonstrate his or her knowledge of the course material through class discussions and other communication with the professor, then there is no need for exams to measure that student’s comprehension.
Unfortunately, most classes at BU are not small enough to allow for this type of interaction between students and professors, and thus other means of assessment must be used. In these cases, the only appropriate tools for measuring student knowledge are papers and projects developed outside the classroom. Not only do these methods provide for a better assessment of student comprehension, but they also ensure that students will not lose valuable class time during exams.
Each class at Boston University costs an incredible amount of money to attend, presumably because students are purchasing the opportunity to learn from some of the most distinguished and accomplished professors in the world. Yet on midterm days, BU students are not getting their money’s worth. Instead of paying these prestigious professors to impart their knowledge upon us, we’re paying them to pass out blue books and write out how much exam time is left on the blackboard, tasks which surely do not require a PhD.
Papers and projects, a better use of both student and faculty time, also provide for a more accurate and practical measure of student comprehension. In preparation for exams, we students attempt to cram as much course information as possible into our minds and hold onto it just long enough to get through those 90 minutes of torture. Currently, I’m working on remembering the names of about 50 prominent figures from Middle Eastern history, but a week from now I probably won’t remember the difference between Ali Baba and Saddam Hussein.
The schedule of midterm and final exams requires this sort of cramming and the subsequent forgetting of information that occurs after cramming. With many exams scheduled in a single 5-to-10 day period, I cannot afford to study Middle Eastern history when I should instead be focused on theories of communication. If I try to start studying for my second or third exams before I have completed the first, then my performance on the initial exam will suffer because I will be focused on information from the other classes. Professors who instruct students not to cram for a midterm must be under the assumption that we have no other exams to study for. But this is obviously not the case.
Papers and projects completed outside of class require students to take concepts from the class and apply them practically. Rather than trying to remember hundreds of dates, names and events, students can focus on the overall concepts from the course and develop these into an effective argument. This provides for greater retention of information from the course and allows students to demonstrate that they not only understand what the professor has lectured about, but also why it is important.
Essay exams, though a better solution than the multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank tests that are sometimes given by professors, are still not nearly as effective as traditional papers and projects. It is only outside the classroom, away from the pressures of nervousness and time constraints, that students are truly free to develop their thoughts.
Papers are also a more practical form of assessment, as good writing is essential to virtually every professional field that students will enter. There will be few instances in life where you’ll need to spew out everything you know about a subject in 90 minutes, but you will very often need to develop and write arguments based on your knowledge of a topic. Some professors require students to both write papers and take midterms, in an effort to make the class “more fair” for students who do not write well. But students who prefer exams to papers should improve their writing skills quickly or prepare themselves for lives marked by failure, as test-taking skills will do them little good outside of academia.
It’s my belief that everything I do in college should be either fun or academically enriching. Exams fall into neither of those categories. Since more effective tools exist for measuring student comprehension of a class, it is inexcusable for professors to continue to use midterms to evaluate our knowledge. Certainly, it is easier for a professor to write up an exam and leave their teaching assistants to grade the simple answers, but any faculty member who is not willing to sacrifice the extra time required to grade a stack of student papers does not deserve the title of Boston University Professor. We students sacrifice a tremendous amount of money to attend classes and we deserve the best possible performance from this university’s distinguished faculty.
But enough of this writing nonsense — I’ve got a midterm to study for.
