Early Modern Notes

I often like John Sutherland’s columns in the Guardian education section. But the latest (from last Monday, although I only just noticed it) ends with a defence of the indefensible.

The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is “continuous assessment” (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.

Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, “revising” for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness.

Full disclosure: I loathe exams, and never did particularly well at them (both recalling all the stuff I’d revised and getting it down rapidly in a coherent form on paper were agony). I did significantly better at essays, which I could prepare and write - think about, plan, revise, write properly, as opposed to frantic scribbling - over several days. Which hardly means that I spent every waking second of every semester on writing essays, for chrissakes. (Also, to be picky, exams still made up more than half the assessment of most of our courses.)

I’m not saying that exams per se are not useful, however. What is indefensible is this championing of ‘finals’: assessing three years’ learning in a few weeks, with the possibility (as Sutherland says; I think it was probably extremely rare) of doing virtually nothing for over two and a half years beforehand. Does he really think that was something to be praised? (By the way, much of the article is about how great this system was in giving musical geniuses such as Coldplay time to hone their skills instead of being made to do what they were at university for… But, leaving aside whether you concur in his evaluation of the talents of Coldplay, there seems to be an implicit and pretty dubious argument that the university system should be tailored to the needs of a tiny minority of artistic geniuses.)

Besides, it’s absurd to compare continuous assessment to a conveyor belt (I’ve worked on those production lines in my time, and for longer than I care to remember; I doubt that Sutherland ever has). I never had too much difficulty making time off between essays, even though I probably spent a lot more time on them than the average student. It creates, instead, a more continous short-term cycle of work-idle-work. Individual students make their own choices about exactly how much and when, just as no doubt they did in the ‘finals’ system. And very often the results reflect the amount of work put in over the whole course - as they probably did for most students, whatever the mythology, in the finals system.

By logical extension, perhaps Sutherland also thinks that we shouldn’t ask undergrads to do things like read for weekly seminars either? And as for compulsory attendance at those seminars…