A Proposal Concerning Exams

THE FOLLOWING proposes that we all refuse to write our final exams this Spring.

The goal of such an exam boycott would be to attack the system of exams and grades which comprises the present academic structure. This would be done because the academic system here does not serve our interests as students and as people, but is in fact opposed to those interests. The reasons why this is so are rather complex, and require some explanation.

MODERN BUREAUCRACIES, like modern factories, require workers who can be counted on to behave in certain ways. The bureaucrat must respect authority, be compulsively punctual, and conform easily to various standards of dress, speech and behavior. The bureaucrat's subservience to his superiors must be combined with an intense competitiveness in his relations with his peers. And most importantly, the bureaucrat must be motivated primarily by his desire for a reward (money, status, prestige) which is external to the work process itself. Like the industrial worker, the bureaucrat is useless to his masters unless he is economically "rational". This means that he must be willing to work solely for money or for some other reward that can be controlled by his employers, and will not seriously insist that his work be meaningful or personally rewarding and enjoyable if he is to perform it.

No one is born with these characteristics; they have to be acquired through training. In the earliest phases of industrialization, this socialization process was carried on largely in the workplace itself, as evidenced by the widespread use of child labor. But actual education in the workplace is ultimately more expensive and less efficient than collectively organized socialization in public schools. Schools, then, developed primarily as mechanisms by which economically desirable patterns of behavior could be imbued in children before they enter into productive activity. The school is a model of the workplace.

The conventional explanation of the school, of course, holds that schools are places where people acquire information that they will need in later life.

But this explanation fails to account for a great many things that we are all familiar with. If schools are merely dispensaries of knowledge, then why did our teachers put such an exaggerated emphasis on our getting to school exactly on time? Why was cheating on exams so fanatically discouraged even though a student writing an examination is no longer in a position to increase his store of knowledge on the subject at hand? Why was such a premium placed on competitiveness, and why were the most creative, most imaginative children always the most heavily penalized? As for the assertion that most of what is learned in school is necessary for later life, how then are we to explain the obvious fact that people generally forget most of what they learn in school after they leave? If the subject matter taught in the schools is necessary for the performance of basic tasks in adult life, then we should expect that this subject matter will be re-inforced by work experience. But such is not the case.

WHEN THE SCHOOL is considered as a center for training rather than for information, then the function of grades and exams assumes a new importance. In the conventional view, exams are no more than a technique for insuring that students learn things that they need to know, and grades encourage students to learn these things. But if schools are primarily designed as teaching models of modern economic enterprises, then grades become the hard coin of the scholastic marketplace. Students learn to sell their labor for money by selling their labor for grades. Exactly as in an office or factory, the school encourages students not to think about the intrinsic pleasure or displeasure of the work that they are required to do, but to respond solely to the easily controllable incentive system provided by the authorities.

For this reason, educational "reforms" such as abolition of exams and grades cannot be considered separately from the organization of society as a whole. Since the organization of the classroom is so intimately related to the organization of the prevailing social institutions, we can't challenge the first without at the same time challenging the second. If we say that the schools should not socialize people for alienated work situations, we must be prepared to argue that alienated work situations are not part and parcel of all advanced societies. Otherwise changing the schools could only create happy but useless people who would then have to be supported by "properly" trained workers.

This is obviously a very important problem, and one that is not yet near to being resolved. But there do seem to be some grounds for expecting that alienation is not a necessary feature of all industrial society. The various aspects of alienation all reflect the central fact that a modern industrial worker or bureaucrat performs his work for someone else's benefit. The work situation does not present him with a goal that he personally values. If a worker controlled his own equipment, if he knew that he was to receive the full value of his work, if he were permitted to determine on his own when he would work and when he would rest, and above all if he felt that his work was serving an end that he personally felt to be important, then it would not be necessary to create the special kind of worker mentality that our schools presently turn out. Alienation appears to be a feature of capitalist industrialism (or in the case of the USSR, statecapitalist industrialism) rather than of industrialism in general. We should not accept such things as fixed.

HOW DOES ALL this apply to Harvard? It would be silly to argue that the abolition of grades and exams at Harvard would have enormous effects on the behavior and attitudes of the people here. Harvard students owe their presence here to their singular success in adapting themselves to the values of the American school system, and it would be naive to expect them to change in any fundamental way after they arrive.

But the abolition of grades would nevertheless have a number of very beneficial effects. The first is that it would greatly facilitate learning. It seems reasonable to expect that students would learn a great deal more if they were able to pursue their own intellectual interests within a rational academic framework. Of course, the kind of studying that now precedes examinations would be a thing of the past, but it is unlikely that students learn very much by cramming, and it is certain that this kind of studying can only atrophy a student's capacity for thought.

A second and perhaps more important benefit which would result from the dismantling of the present academic structure here would be the creation of an intellectual milieu conducive to critical social thought.

Critical thought cannot flourish in a hierarchical academy whose organization faithfully mirrors the present economic organization of society. Grades can force people to study national income or genetics or Shakespeare, but they militate against the study of a new, humane society. And they foster the illusion that there are no alternatives to an economic system based on contrived, sterile incentives, and operated for the benefit of the few. By ridding ourselves of this academic system, we will be creating a model of an alternative system of work--a system in which people work because they want to, because the work is in itself relevant and rewarding, because they are their own masters.

THERE ARE SEVERAL reasons why an effort to abolish the grading system should begin with an exam boycott. The first is that exams constitute the individual's most abject and intense subjection to the academic system. Exams are the most personally humiliating and meaningless situations that the academic system imposes on the individual student. They are also the point in the system where the dichotomy between learning and academic structure becomes most obvious: the very fact that an exam in English is conducted exactly like an exam in Geology is enough to make clear to many students the fact that exams have absolutely nothing to do with intellectual concerns. There can be no explanation of why students are required to scribble frantic little essays on vast and intricate subjects except in terms of economic needs which are wholly foreign to the intellectual content of their courses.

The most efficient way of organizing a boycott of exams would probably involve the circulation of a pledge, to become effective and binding once a certain number of people--at least two-thirds of the student body--had signed it. This could be organized by a fairly small number of interested people willing to devote some time to the project. While this group would best be able to work out such details, it seems likely that the boycott would have to exclude people on probation, and possibly also graduating seniors.

An exam boycott is in several ways a perfect tactic. It is disruptive, of course, but it disrupts only its object. No classes will be interfered with, no learning will in any way be curtailed. A boycott has the further virtue of embodying both the petition and the implementation of radical academic change. An effective exam boycott would not only urge the Administration formally to abolish exams, but would in reality be effecting such abolition unilaterally, since the Administration would have no way of counteracting the boycott short of failing the entire student body, which would be inherently meaningless.

We have been trained all our lives to believe that nothing we as individuals can do will make any difference, that acceptance of our condition is the key to fulfillment. The strike was for many of us the first opportunity to discover that we are each of us individuals with the capacity for rational choices and independent action. Now that exams are approaching, everyone feels suddenly helpless: there seems to be no way of overcoming Harvard's reassertion of its control over us in the next month. But that control depends entirely on our willingness to co-operate. Since exams and the academic structure which they support are not in our interests as people, nor in the interests of most of the people of this country, we should simply withdraw our co-operation. There are so many things to do in the next month that are more valuable and useful than cramming for exams.