Beyond the Parkyn Report

"What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?" —Allen Ginsberg, Howl.

I have argued that the major defects of our universities can be traced to the examination system, and that this system must be either abandoned or radically reformed.

But the problem of examinations cannot be studied in isolation, nor can it be understood if approached solely from the point of view of evaluating achievement or of setting standards. If reform in this field is to succeed, we must have a clear idea of the place and purpose of evaluation in the modern university.

The Parkyn report, with all its admirable recommendations, may fail to persuade because it fails to transcend the purely technical level.

The problems of unreliability and inconsistent standards are, as Parkyn has shown, serious enough; but the wider questions of the validity of examinations and their consequences for the individual remain unanswered.

When the aims of a university are defined, the conduct of examinations is not usually listed among them; yet in the minds of students and academic staff they tend to occupy a very prominent place. However ill-performed, the functions of teaching and research remain — at least ideally — the central concerns of the institution. That the business of examinations compromises the former and obstructs the latter is sometimes recognised; but it has usually been accepted as a necessary evil. If Socrates were to return to earth he might gain the impression that his statement, "The life that is unexamined is not worth living," has been accepted too literally and somewhat extravagantly by our educational system.

Exams Useful in Theory

And yet examinations may in theory serve a variety of useful purposes. They may be used (1) as a means of instruction; (2) as a form of educational administation; (3) for purposes of admission to various occupations, professions and government service; and (4) as a means of social control. They serve the backward-looking function of assessing the student's attainments, and the forward-looking one of assessing his aptitudes, whether for job-placement or for further education. Properly-constructed tests can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses, suggest alterations in course content or teaching methods, and safeguard standards for admission to the professions.

What is surprising is that the traditional essay-type examination should continue to be so popular, when it serves these purposes so poorly.

Those who support traditional examinations have, however, always attributed to them a high educational value. Preparation for examinations, it is said, trains students to deal with new material, to discriminate between the important and the unimportant, to appreciate the relevance of hitherto unrelated details, to grasp a subject as a whole and to combine its parts into a vital organic unity, to hold knowledge ready on demand, to think for themselves. Through examinations, it is held, the teacher obtains an impartial estimate of what a student knows, and the student discovers what he has really mastered. The timid student acquires confidence and the conceited student gains humility.

These arguments are not new; they are taken from an article in the Educational Review of 1900. But I doubt that any stronger could be proposed today. They are, if anything, less adequate now than they were then. Preparation for examinations, as we all know, encourages cramming, rote learning, and meaningless mnemonics.

Original thinking, individual emphasis, the ''brilliant new synthesis" are all impossible — only hackneyed thoughts may be expressed, if only because the time limit prevents the development of an adequate justification for a novel idea.

The timid student finds to his surprise that the desired level of mediocrity is not difficult to attain, and the proud student finds to his dismay that intellect goes unrewarded.

In my own experience, those who are most successful at examinations are often their sharpest critics. It may be, as G. L. Brook has claimed, that anxiety about examinations is strongest among the very best students, "since they know that their opportunity of pursuing a life-time of study as university teachers or researchers is likely to depend more than anything on the quality of their degree." Or, on the other hand, it may be that the best students realise the full extent of the intellectual prostitution required.

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Besides, in the roulette of unreliable examinations, the marks of the A-grade student can only fluctuate in one direction — downward.

Even rather tepid supporters of the essay-type examination, such as Brook, admit that the usual type of paper, asking for answers to four or five questions in three hours, tests a very specialised kind of ability and puts a premium on speed and superficiality. It limits the student to one mode of expression, and often provides a more sensitive measure of writing speed and resistance to anxiety than of educational attainment.

It was recognised as early as 1891 (if not before) that the examination, is used as the sole criterion of success, is an unmitigated evil. Superintendent E. E. White, in a U.S. Bureau of Education circular published in 1891, argued that the widespread use of examinations "has narrowed and grooved instruction, encouraged the use of mechanical and rote methods, and occasioned cramming and vicious habits of study."

It came to be understood very early (although obviously not in New Zealand) that the best study is done where there is the freest play of motives and of natural curiosity; and the worst study where there is the most absorbing interest in examination marks, leading to overpressure, strain, waste, dishonesty and mis-education.

A more modern criticism is given by the sociologist Peter Marris, who interviewed students and staff at several British universities:

"Examinations unquestionably do great harm, at all levels of education. They alienate the student from his personal interest in the subject he studies, rob him of initiative, and encourage whatever kind of learning is easiest to test, irrespective of its relevance. Original work is discouraged, because it is difficult to mark: original interest, because it upsets the curriculum. The teacher's role is confused with that of assessor, and the student is inhibited from seeking guidance for fear of being judged."

According to the Parkyn report the unreliability of examinations causes many unnecessary failures. This article, the second of three, reviews other consequences of the present examination system which are equally pernicious.

No Amount of Cane

Evidence has been accumulated over the last 70 years in Britain, Europe and America to show that no amount of care in setting and marking essay-type examinations can eliminate the fallibility of subjective judgements. The publication of the Parkyn report represents, I hope, New Zealand's realisation of this simple fact.

It is a moral atrocity to rate an individual by a system which, when required to work to a moderate degree of accuracy, is wrong nearly as often as it is right.

Examinations cannot be improved until the examiner knows what he really wants.

One of the things he should want is to discover and encourage originality and diversity. The attempt to make all of a group of students satisfy a certain task equally is a reductio ad absurdam.

Nor should the purpose of examinations be that of passing some students and failing others, but rather that of discovering how the students stand in relation to each other, and how they differ from each other. This cannot be done by setting up a standard of passing or failing, as if there were only two conceivable students A and not-A (the elect and the nonelect), nor by the a priori assumption that there are four conceivable classes of students, A, B, C and D (of which D stands for the non-elect). There are, in fact, as many classes as there are students. It follows that the system of giving marks or grades for creative work is based on an artificial theory for which there is no foundation, as is shown by the variation of marks given to the same paper by different markers.

In an ideal system of education the notion of "failing" would have no place. Educational thinking would centre around the notions of growth and development — true success, after all, is not to be measured primarily by the accumulation of units, but by the degree and kind of growth achieved along the lines of individual capacity and personal needs.

Own Course of Education

This would culminate in a university where each student would follow his own course of education, guided by his teachers within a broad disciplinary framework of his own choosing, but free of the stultifying pressure of narrowly fixed curricula and final examinations.

Graduation certificates would be granted to all those who had made the growth possible for them within a given period of time, with the degree of development achieved indicated on the certificate.

Certificates of professional qualification — for example, in medicine, law, or engineering — would be issued to those who chose to meet the requirements for practice.

Granted that such a system — called by Marris the "spontaneous university" — would have drawbacks for personnel selection, the allocation of scholarships, and even for the arrangement of programmes of instruction. But would they really be much worse than those of the present system, with, its spurious quantitative standardisation and its blatant disregard for individual differences in aptitudes and interests?

A Dividing Line

The question involved here may be asked in another way: how much education has an individual received if he has failed, or just passed, and so on—How much more has a person with first-class honours learned than a person with second-class?

The traditional examination, like a hurdle, is a crude thing: it divides people up into those who manage to make it over the top and those who don't. But the purpose of an assessment system is not to provide a jumping contest, or indeed a contest of any kind. It is to assess the extent to which an individual has profited from exposure to the experience of education. And, inevitably, it remains as much a test of the teacher as of the taught.

One of the worst troubles with the whole examination system is that it has been devised by professors, and professors are generally experts in their subject matter rather than experts in the learning process or in instructional practices. As a result they tend to be inflexible in teaching according to the patterns to which they were exposed.

New Zealand's academics, it must be admitted, are by and large a rather sorry lot. Many of them