A week or so ago I posted a comment (See it at the end at the end of this one) indicating that our CUNY students are simply not being taught to write anything much, let alone critical research papers in most of their courses. This week I asked my students in a class whether their courses that did not ask for writing offered more than a mid term and final exam? Most indicated that the mid term and final exam pattern was it and the sole basis for the evaluation of their work.
Needless to say, one need not have to have been at it as long as I have to recollect that term papers used to be routine in most college courses AND one was also taught how to do exams because teachers wrote critical comments on them before returning them. Guess what? Most of our students are NEVER taught how to write an exam at Brooklyn College and apparently other CUNY colleges as well? I reported recently watching one of our former adjuncts (no longer with us who happened to be teaching something like 6-8 classes in three colleges, including two with us) grading his mid terms. His procedure was to flip through an exam and put a grade on the front cover. Somewhat mesmerized I timed him and discovered that he was averaging 9 seconds per exam.
And guess what again -- sometime before I arrived at Brooklyn College in 1970 -- an across the board decision had been made not to return final exams to students at all -- no comments, no explanation, only a final course grade that was presumed to include the final exam one. Said exams are retained for a year by departments in case students wish to protest a particular grade -- a very up hill process involving a department faculty committee that reevaluates the student's work and may lower as well as raise a final grade!
Upshot -- our students are NEVER taught HOW to do exams. I tried an experiment once with one of my classes of a series of (non-graded) weekly quizzes focused on answering the question right. The rules of this game were quite simple. Read the exam question -- sometimes quite muddled by those who write them. Figure out ALL the parts that need to be answered and outline an answer (by the end of the third week all of my students were answering essay question clearly -- 2/3 had never been taught how to do so until then. The rest had learned in high school from a good teacher along the way -- see previous report by a non-CUNY adjunct below). Figure which of a series of essay questions one is best prepared to answer and do that one FIRST, the second best next, and leave the least prepared one to the last -- such starts the faculty member off with a good impression that generally carries over to a better grade. If in desperation one does not know the answer to the last essay, write a sentence repeating the question and then draw a line and indicate ("Time called.") which usually elicits some faculty mercy. If there are, g-d forbid, identification questions on which most cheat either by whisper or looking over a shoulder, don't panic but read them through and quickly answer those you know first. Some will pop back into memory later as one relaxes a bit with the bulk of the exam completed. When I used to ask such short answer questions, some students would complain about the cheating of others and I watched it directly in one exam room where a colleague and I were assigned to give our exams together. Some of my students complained that the whispering of his were distracting them from writing their essays.
Multiple choice exams in most areas are a fraud as testing devices. And there are tricks for them as well -- look at the answers and if math is involved, one generally finds only one or two can be the right answer per decimal point locations and the last number or two of the questions, e.g. 987 X 49,284.3 =
a) ...... 09 b) .... .06 c) ...... 9.6 d) ......4.1 e) ..... 41
The full answer would be 48643604.1 However, my math teacher on the SAT committee taught us simply to check out the last two digits and decimal point which makes d) necessarily the right answer by processes of elimination. Ergo one gets the answer in half the time and the SATs are curved exams, so the faster one moves with such techniques the vastly better ones does. Such techniques NOT TAUGHT TO OUR CUNY STUDENTS either in CUNY or their previous public schools, but generally are to those in our private secondary schools. Ergo ours is increasingly becoming a divided class system in Amerika -- otherwise known as the "Ownership Society" (i.e. owned and operated by those who can afford to do so)! Bush was sent to Andover (where he made his mark as a cheer leader) to prep for Yale. His father was captain of the Yale baseball team and not a dummy. Bush got into Yale as his daddy's little boy -- special preferences for dumb, but wealthy Yale alumni children back then.
As you can see, I don't think very highly of exams -- particularly in philosophy where critical thinking is to be done which should be deliberative and not top of the head. I give exams, but they are open book (bring notes and texts and mom, if you need her) and open conversation and are focused on applying methods of analysis and criticism that one has learned in class to essays on new subject matters. I base grades on the best writing and talking students have done during the course and only use exams to tip grades one way or another that happen to be borderline. Students may carry their exams off to our computers, if they wish. Footnotes are required if they 'Google' additional materials. The stress is on writing a thoughtful critical essay. Refreshments are served -- brought to the exam room by class volunteers including Kosher. Please, no alcoholic beverages. One older student brought along her philosophy major brother for assistance, but he just slowed her down and was a bit out of date in his thinking.
Now on to the specifics of discrimination built into in our external testing systems. By chance I had the best of secondary educations both in the U.S. and Britain. When I took the SATs I had been taught how to do the verbal part by the chairman of the committee that designed them. His honors students ordinarily got top scores with half a dozen or so ranked in the first 20 of the nation. He would spend a week or so teaching us the tricks of this particular trade. If giving answers to stuff in essays, one should scan the questions FIRST before the text so as to know what one is looking for which speeds things up. We had been drilled for years in vocabulary and analogies, so were super stars in ripping through these. The same prepping carried over into the GREs as well, so we ordinarily did "super" (British schoolboy slang) on those as well when we made college. I had the good fortune to take mine following upon a special intensive first two year program at Yale (Directed Studies) that led them to give us the GREs at the end of sophomore year. Needless to say we were that much nearer the secondary school years of SATs and most of us scored in the upper 1% which was most useful in applying to graduate school and for national fellowships two years later.
One reads that the SAT guys are planning to do a more expansive exam next year of 4 hours with less stress on command of vocabulary -- which has been a constant source of discrimination against college applicants who have not had the preppie equivalent of a community college education before they applied for college. The father of one of my dearest friend Dan, John Huden, professor of education at UVM and thereafter the president of a Vermont teachers college (See Google), himself part native American and expert both on testing and native American affairs more than half a century ago, was even then pointing out the gross injustices in our testing systems.
And then there is the cheating. In response to my students' reports of cheating on the LSATs a few years back, I checked both with two law school deans and the LSAT officials themselves who confirmed this dirty little secret -- the latter said they did not have the resources to halt the cheating. The same is reported periodically about the SATs. And the much vaunted increases in NYC school children's' scores this year were reported in the recent NY Times education section (Wednesdays) to be the result not of much improvement in teaching and, thus, learning, but rather of a much easier exam given this year than last. Ferrer's criticisms of Bloomberg's education boasts are accurate, if woofy (neologism) headed. A school system that barely graduates 50% from our NYC high schools is a DISGRACE!!!! We are stuck with testing games rather than LEARNING now because of Edward Thorndike's animal psychology testing obsessions that crawled into American education even before John Huden was condemning same. Thorndike, teaching at Columbia Teachers College back when, persuaded many that the same techniques for modifying cat and dog behavior were appropriate for teaching kids. Such turned much American education into a behaviorist's heaven, but not a place of real learning. Such is garbage crammed into students in the classroom and garbage regurgitated in final examinations -- to be forgotten and discarded -- and probably just as well as soon much of it will be outdated and replaced by different facts and theories in the social sciences, different tastes and preferences in the arts and humanities, updates in the sciences, new rationalizations ("revisions") in history et al. And we are now drastically falling behind our global competitors as the NY Times reports such things as China snatching some of our best academic minds as their universities rapidly pull ahead of ours.
What is missing is teaching our students HOW TO LEARN, i.e. how to do their own 'updating' throughout their lives. Sadly one sees far too many 'old grads' locked into the 4 year framework of their now anachronistic undergraduate years -- my Yale class is breathlessly preparing for its 50th next year. Nothing that has occurred sense has been taken into account or modified by far too many of them. This, incidentally is an horrendous threat to us all embodied in the mediocre appointments that have been made to one of our most critical institutions, the Supreme Court, the function of which should be precisely updating social justice in our democracy on a regular basis rather than returning us to the world of the 'founding fathers' -- slave owners involved in genocidal attacks on the original inhabitants of our fair continent, subordinating women to their own uses, fair or foul, excluding any not property owners from the political process, etc. See Tom Paine on the whole bloody lot of them. Where are the likes of Marshall, Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Black and many other distinguished jurists of yore which we so desperately need today? -- teaching in our leading law schools and cringing over this Court and the abuses of the Bush administration as am I! Ed Kent
P.S. Taking a momentary break from drafting this, I ran into one of my wider CUNY colleagues at Lehman who agrees that we are cheating our students and are ourselves being cheated -- both students and faculty by the stinkingly cheap contract that we have been offered with a decline in real compensation combined with imcreases in course loads. He, too, was startled to be told not to return final exams -- and the rationale emerges -- "because they might pass them along to future classes of students who would benefit therefrom. Yes, some students do have access to exams anyway and do benefit. They also reuse papers (I had two students who did not know each other hand in the same paper in a class). But the answer of fairness is, of course, that all past exams should be given too all our students so that a select few do not benefit -- any student can see his/her exam, if demanded. I tell my students to keep their exam sheets and change the content, if not the typology of exams.
Need I point out that the vast bulk of us not educated at CUNY of late used to write term papers routinely for a number of courses each semester, that we saw our final exams with comments indicating on them where we had gone astray so that the information would be corrected in our heads -- this is a valuable part of the learning process! I speak out angrily here as one educated in two countries by first rate teaching who taught before I settled in at Brooklyn at Vassar, Barnard, Columbia, Hunter, CCNY, and even Duchess Community College two summers -- at all of which we used to to it RIGHT. Let us have no more nonsense from our CUNY board (to whom this is sent by blind copy) as to how it has 'improved' CUNY standards -- it has sat on its hands in providing monies that we need to to do things right, allowed exclusions of students who should have the opportunity for a higher education both by doing nothing about the cheating of our kids in most of our public schools from which nearly half are not graduating and, thus, cannot enter CUNY and the rest -- except the few from our super schools are being horrendously cheated by Ownership Amerika where those who can send their children to private schools where kids are taught to ace exams. The private school tuition costs, incidentally, have risen drastically and are now out of the price range of our junior faculty members. Columbia started a special school to accommodate its faculty and has another public magnet school just promised by Bloomberg to accommodate the overflow.
Finally, this pattern haunting us at CUNY is spreading across North America -- the corporatization of higher education -- obsessed with short term expense cutting, but oblivious to the massive damage being done to our long-term national interest as our global competitors supersede us in the domain of making first rate higher education widely available to those willing and able to undertake it -- where we once held the lead that made us a great nation!
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[Report here from an adjunct in another part of the country followed by my comments following on from same. Ed Kent]
"My wife and I just returned from visiting our 9th grade son's school. His English teacher, who I like, allows students to improve their grades by revising their work. But before they do, they must spent 10 or 15 minutes with him talking about their papers. Otherwise, the teacher
explained, a revision might "be a waste of everybody's time."
As an English instructor, I recognize the wisdom in asking that thought go into revised work.
But as an adjunct with multiple jobs, I can't imagine adopting a similar policy myself because it's all I can do now to scramble between my two jobs, prepare, and evaluate the writing that students do. Taking on a task that could commit up to 10 minutes of time for up to 50 total
students in my two classes would be suicidal."
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The above comment is borrowed from a list without permission, but it pretty well tells the story of what adjuncts are up against. They kill themselves and make tremendous sacrifices of their own interests to teach as best they can -- but one can only do so much rushing from class to class, college to college, trying to make ends meet.
I asked one of my Brooklyn College philosophy classes -- a large one -- the other day how many had written more than ten pages for a course (other than a mid term and final exam). One student raised her hand. I asked for what course she had exceeded 10 pages and she responded -- in a business course.
And then there is our B.C. library that packs up at 9 p.m. when evening classes are just ending and when students might just want to pop in to pick up a book or to browse. We have a 24-hour library cafe in another building, but it houses only computers without library book or article
access. Sounds like a nice place to hang out.
And so it goes in American higher education. Our CUNY board boasts how it has improved the quality of the education we are offering while our numbers of full-time faculty have been halved and part-timers such as the one quoted here take on ever larger proportions of our teaching.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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