How Tests Kill Thinking

Academic tests, at least in the humanities, are odd things. Do I really need to prove that I read all of Moby Dick, know what year the Magna Carta was, or what happened at the Potsdam Conference? Sure, knowing these things is important if I want to be an expert and scholar in a field. After all, that's what an expert is: one who knows all that stuff.

But is that why we're teaching students in our schools and colleges — to turn those 14 year olds into Melvillian scholars who go on to give tests on Moby Dick to 14 year olds so they, in turn, become scholars who teach 14 years when Melville was born? That's how we create the closed, strange, politics-laden worlds of the academy. It's not how we teach students to think or enjoy books, history, ideas, art, or life itself. On the contrary, by teaching students that there is one answer that they need to know — and that they need to prove they know  — we drain the vitality from the surging splendor of learning something new.

Tests are police actions. Show me your papers! And part of me understands that impulse. When I was teaching, I'd find myself frustrated and annoyed that students hadn't done the assigned reading. I told them to read it, dammit! And I'm gonna punish them if they didn't! But I realized that that was my ego, not my pedagogy. The student has to decide if she wants to read the book, if she wants to engage with it, if she wants to learn. I sure don't need her to prove to me that she read it. What good does that do anybody?

The logic of tests is the logic of the univocal. There is one answer. What is it? Tell me! Tell me! Even essay tests are odd in that they demand a student think and write quickly. I always gave final papers, not final exams. I wanted my students' best thinking, not their fastest thinking.

School and its grades coerce us into thinking there are answers when all there are are approaches, spins, takes. Answers are the least interesting aspect of any inquiry. The question is everything. The question opens things up; the question frames, distributes and redistributes concepts, facts, perspectives. Answers do the opposite: they close thought down. I know the answer! I'm done!

So rather than asking students to take tests, we should be asking them to create tests. What even counts as a question? In a class of 23 students all studying the Potsdam Conference , I'd love to see 23 radically different tests. (I have to confess: I have no idea what the Potsdam Conference is, although I could guess; I just like saying it.)

Now, when it comes to licensing, tests make sense. Licensing is the way an institution polices itself, regulates itself. So of course licensees need to know how to administer the DTaP vaccine, do ear washes, know what a duodenom is. Of course, knowing these things doesn't have any correlation with how good the licensee is at his job — in this case, a medical professional of some sort. I have to say: I am pushing 50 and have never, not once, had a doctor tell me something I didn't know about my body or health. In my experience, the doctor and I follow the same decision tree on WebMD and come to the same conclusion. The art of diagnosis — for surely it is as much an art as a science — as if science and art are opposed, which they most certainly are not — anyway, the art of diagnosis is not taught and has little to do with passing an exam.

I also get why we have standardized tests. After all, high school students have an enormous variety of experiences from a ridiculously varied set of circumstances. For colleges to assess students, they need — or so they imagine — some kind of standard. That makes sense (even if I disagree).

And I, for one, always enjoyed the SATs. The questions, especially the math, are clever in that they don't rely on deep knowledge of math per se but on the ability to know how to solve a math problem.  I'm terrible at them. I know because I find myself using pen and paper when I know I should be able to look at the answers and know. I'll say this: the creators of those questions are a clever lot, truly.

But I'm still not sure what the SATs assess, exactly. In vocabulary, the text demands knowledge of roots and etymologies and, at times, rote memorization. Reading comp is a good test — although I had to fight my urge to discover alternate interpretations. I just figured out what the test wanted. And, alas, this might be the point of SATs: they test your ability to take tests. Which is useful in a school that gives tests. It wouldn't be so important in my hypothetical test-free school.

Because, at one point in my sophomore year of college, I decided I'd never take another test. I was in a class on French feminism. And the professor assigned an exam. An exam! In a class on feminism! It seemed so phallocentric: Give me the right answer or you fail!  What does Hélène Cixous call the perpetual state of mystical, orgasmic play that undoes the sanctity of the unified subject? Tell me! It was hilariously absurd. So I refused to take that test. "Tests are police actions," I argued, "coercing alignment with institutional knowledge, reinforcing the reigning discourse. You not only judge me but I judge my self-worth by my ability to participate in the prescribed knowledge field." I'd been reading a lot of Foucault. The professor was neither pleased nor persuaded and my grade suffered, as it were. But I didn't.

And I did persuade myself — and so I never took another exam. When I took my mandatory science classes — Physical Anthropology and Physics for Poets — I wouldn't answer any test questions. In Anthro, I flipped the test over — did I really need to memorize which lemurs are diurnal? — and critiqued the assumptions of the text book. In Physics, I flipped the exam over and tied the concepts we were studying to the philosophy I was reading. I got Cs in both classes (if you go to a fancy school and pay enough money, they refuse to fail you; a C was the lowest I could get; in a community college, I'd have failed, for sure.) As for the GMATs, I mostly doodled, filling in those little circles in silly ways.

Being asked to prove that I'd memorized the feeding habits of monkeys was, and remains, absurd. If I were requesting to go on an expedition in which I was expected to study said monkeys, of course an exam would make sense. But for an undergraduate student in a required physical sciences class? Why not teach me what physical anthropology cares about, the kinds of questions it asks and can ask, how the text book succeeds and fails and how it might otherwise be constructed?

To think is to distribute concepts, facts, bodies, forces into different configurations. It's certainly not memorizing how someone else did all that. Tests not only don't teach thinking; they squash it. And, worse, their status in schools make it such that students assess their own worth by how they do on tests. So, in effect, testing shuts down the act of thinking among all our citizens and hence among our culture at large. Which explains a lot about this world.

So I offer one simple suggestion. Rather than using one text book in a course, have each student write an outline for how they'd write a textbook for the course. And, at the end of the semester, rather than giving an exam, have each student go home and write a test.