The Winter of Our Discontent

Once again that season is upon us. Once again countless pages of material and countless hours of work culminate in three hours of combat with a blue book. And, once again, our insights, errors and intricacies of thought are rewarded with the praise or condemnation of mute symbols. In numerous courses at Harvard students never get their exams back, much less receive intelligent criticism of them. The exam has become what most profess it should not be, a race for a grade in which students hurriedly put down what they know and rarely find out what they don't.

But an exam is nothing less than a course paper and should be treated as such. At the very least, blue books should be given back to students rather than stowed away. More important, graders should annotate the essays. And, more utopian, hours for conferences between graders and students should be arranged. Presently, of these requisites for exam grading only the first occurs at all and even then only with irregularity.

Admittedly, there are several problems with these suggestions. Graders often have a great many exams to finish in a very short time since grades must be recorded a week after the date of the examination. But such restrictions need not be prohibitive; more men could grade fewer papers or the deadline could be pushed back. Certainly something could be done. Unfortunately most course grading operates with a belief in the validity of the bureaucracy's needs and little concern for the undergraduate. It seems clear that if students were given back carefully read exams and were given the chance for conferences, the rites of winter and spring would become a less dissatisfying and more enlightening experience.