Word: exam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Second, and more important, is the limitation imposed by the three-hour exam on creative and original thought. Too often it is the student's retentive ability and not his grasp of subject matter that is tested. If the aim of a course is intelligent and independent thought on a given subject, then this should be the quantity tested, not, as so often happens, memory or blind luck in spotty preparation...
...course may be, it should require not only retention but synthesis as well. Simple police activity can be reserved for section quizzes that keep pace with the assigned reading, and should not take up so large a measure of the summary project. That project can range from an exam to an openbook or take-home test, to a pre-assigned exam topic or even the term paper...
...which the student, with permission to consult his sources, must still draw together his material and produce a comprehensive essay. A pre-assigned topic assumes that, even with foreknowledge, the assignment is sufficiently difficult to demand creative thought while allowing a student to shape and direct his pre-exam studying. This system simply gives more time to the summary work, spreading the synthesis over weeks instead of 180 minutes...
...effort on independent work. If the topic is narrow, the student must demonstrate sufficient grasp of the wider range of the course to treat intelligently one aspect of it. If the broad synthesis itself is assigned, the student has accomplished essentially the same things that he would on an exam, but with the elimination of the irrelevant variables...
...traditional final exam produces a fundamentally passive attitude in the student; he is given a set of questions, and told to respond to them. Normally this response will take the form of pre-digested answers as the lecturer offered them. The six courses which this term have departed from standard procedure are demanding a far more active and rigorous job from their participants...