Here’s something I never thought I’d say—I wish I was tested more. Like I wish that there had been more instances where I sat down in a classroom chair, pencil in my sweaty, I’m-going-to-fail palm and felt my heart rate quicken at the sight of a piece of paper.
This desire is strange from a number of perspectives. I’m not a masochist—I hate this experience just as much as you do. And even from a broad societal perspective, I’d argue that a great deal of what’s wrong with our K-12 classrooms is an increased focus on standardized testing.
But still, in my last year of college, the desire is there. Specifically, I wish I had been quizzed on all of the reading I did—and, if we’re being honest, often didn’t do—in college. I wish it had happened in almost every single one of my classes, every week or something close to it. Here’s why.
I have a severe inferiority complex about studying the humanities and social sciences. Anyone who studies them has been on the receiving end of teasing remarks about how relatively easy they are. And I defend my majors, but I feel a little disingenuous doing so. I’m almost positive that, if I planned well, I could 4.0 an English major without ever cracking open an actual book.
How many times have I sat in a classroom in which the discussion is so obviously motivated by people trying to disguise the fact that they haven’t done the reading? Or been a part of discussions in which two or three people converse about the topic and the rest conveniently look down at their notes right when the professor starts cold calling?
How can I claim to have had a rigorous academic experience if, whenever the going got a little tough—or the socializing got a little fun—I could get out of hours upon hours of reading with my only penalty mildly inhibited classroom participation?
When I ran this idea past people who study the same subjects I do, I generally got one of two responses. Either people said “Yes! My favorite classes all had reading quizzes!” or “But there’s no possible way I could actually complete the reading I’m assigned each week.”
I agree with both of these comments. In some cases, a class has so much reading there’s no way to truly read every word. But what happens in this scenario is so strange I think the Psychology department would do well to look into it.
Several times, I’ve entered into curious arrangements in which the reading load is so comically heavy that both the professors and the students know that no one is doing it, but no one has anything to gain by acknowledging the problem. So we all become complicit in this terribly awkward ruse. It’s really very weird.
Having reading quizzes would force these professors to be more intelligent about their syllabi. What do we really need to read for full understanding? What would be better to skim? These are difficult questions that I think many professors would rather avoid—in an ideal world, we’d read everything they list and more. But when professors don’t spend time making these hard choices, they disrespect the time of the diligent ones trying to complete the reading, and they incentivize and assist in others’ negligence.
It’s time for these professors to get smarter about their syllabi, and then we’ll respect their effort by adhering to them more closely.
A third most popular response I received when I pitched this idea was for people to claim that the people who didn’t do the reading were only hurting themselves. Those who were truly intellectually curious or valued their education, they argued, would simply do the reading.
But those diligent people are hurt by the general negligence in two ways—first, it’s often those who do not read who get the high grades because it’s easy to write a good essay without completing the reading, and, second, the quality of the discussion in a generally negligent class diminishes severely. With reading quizzes, those who already read will get a grade boost, and, even better, study after study shows that the simple existence of a quiz improves recall.
Others responded that quizzing shifts the focus from critical thinking to regurgitation, lowering the sophistication of the analysis. But reading quizzes are not a replacement for essays and discussion grades—they are a supplement to them. The better the foundation upon which the critical thinking is built, the better that high-level thinking will be.
And if the worry is that quizzes take too much class time, maybe it’s time to lengthen these classes a little. I know—I’m just making this idea more and more palatable. But seriously—it’s time to reflect a little on the fact that math and hard sciences often have recitations, long labs and lectures. The argument for the less time spent in the classroom for social sciences and humanities is that they require extra time spent reading. But if that is the case, then we better make sure that the students who excel are actually doing it.
I care about the subjects I study. I want them given proper rigor. I want them to be as difficult as they truly are to master, both for me and everyone else.
When I sat down to write this column, I remembered a conversation I had when I was thirteen years old with the headmaster of the boarding school I wound up attending.
“At Fountain Valley,” he said, “not everybody is a genius. But the students care. The question is no longer ‘Did you do your homework?’ It’s ‘How well did you do your homework?’”
He was right, and the four years I spent there were the most intellectually stimulating years of my life.
We attend one of the top universities in the United States. How are we still stuck on that first question?
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. This is her first column of the semester.
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