Harvard Needs More Quizzes

Attending a humanities seminar at Harvard is a bit like playing Mafia. Everyone sits around a table, lies with reckless abandon, and evades eye contact for about an hour.

Only in seminar, the deception is much more obvious than in Mafia. There’s the relentless ambiguity: “I think the scene destabilizes the binary between interiority and exteriority in the text.” The arcane references to books not assigned in the class: “Have we considered that the author is playing upon the Hegelian Dialectic?” And, of course, the contrived yet incontrovertible anecdote: “Tolstoy’s work really spoke to me as a child of divorce who was raised in Catholic school.”

Why don’t students stop pretending and just read the book? Magazine writers consider the under-read Harvard student a delicious curiosity. They attribute our reading difficulties to a range of cultural phenomena — smartphones, shrinking high school syllabi, the professionalization of higher education.

I have a different diagnosis: students don’t read because they don’t have to. A typical humanities course assigns a few papers and maybe an end-of-semester exam. Participation grades are generous. Instructors rarely call upon students randomly. Why read when there are a dozen other demands on one’s time?

Our current incentive system discourages reading, and the best way to change student behavior is to test students more regularly. We could start each humanities lecture with a five-minute quiz, asking basic factual questions about the reading: “Which of these arguments was not made in the text?” “What is the name of the main character’s wife?” “Was she still alive at the end of the story?”

Some students might refuse to read and fail the quizzes. But if there is one thing that unites Harvard’s undergraduates, it is an unnatural sensitivity to failure. We go to great lengths to avoid an A-minus, even when it matters little. This University selects for perfectionists.

That is why, when students are forced to read, they usually do. History 23: “Immigration Law,” has short quizzes on reading material at the start of each lecture. According to the Q Guide — a course evaluation system — almost half of students spend 6-8 hours a week on the course, a figure above the department average. As one student succinctly explains, “The quizzes are annoying, but they’re not too bad and actually do make you do the readings.”

I think part of the reluctance about testing comes from a hopeful view of education: students should read books because they are curious, not because they want to do well on a test. From this perspective, a percentage score degrades the process of learning, making school a game of optimization rather than a place for intellectual creativity.

One flaw with this argument is that Harvard is already a game of optimization. Students carefully allot their time to professional clubs, corporate recruiting processes, and courses outside the humanities, which are more likely to have exams or regular problem sets. This culture might be regrettable, but it’s here to stay. Humanities classes need to begin punishing those who don’t read — as artificial as these punishments might be — in order to compete for students’ time.

A more glaring problem is that students aren’t living up to the ideals of self-directed learning. While plenty of students are curious and want to read more, there’s a difference between motivation in the abstract and at the moment of decision.

Wanting to be a person who reads is different from actually reading. The purpose of testing, or deadlines, or an attendance policy, is to give students the structure they need to make the decisions they want.

It’s a little paternalistic, but everything about an American university is a little paternalistic. We can make ethical judgments about why students have difficulty committing to their coursework, or we can begin rewarding the kind of behavior we expect.

This is a philosophy we accept in many other areas of higher education. Many law professors cold-call their students with questions about assigned cases, not-so-gently nudging them to pick up a book. A typical undergraduate math course has a problem set due every week or two: nobody assumes students will attend every topology lecture and absorb the relevant concepts out of sheer love for mathematics.

By and large, problem sets are effective in encouraging students to put in the work – about ten hours per math course per week, according to course reviews. It is only in the humanities that we assume undergraduate students’ intrinsic motivation will be enough to keep them afloat.

Testing isn’t the enemy of intellectual curiosity. It’s an ally of convenience — an invitation to stop hoodwinking our peers on a weekly basis and hit the stacks instead.

Annushka Agarwal ‘27, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a double concentrator in History and Mathematics in Kirkland House.