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| The Eighth Bluebook |
| Imagine that you are an undergraduate taking a three-hour final exam in Renaissance Literature. You have done fairly well on two short papers in the course, but your hour exam was disappointing. If they ask the right questions on this final, you should get at least a B in the course. You have reviewed your lecture notes. You did the readings carefully, and distilled your notes into a comparison of the major themes and methods of the important writers. You've browsed through one of the books on the recommended reading list, a study supporting most of your lecturer's interpretations. Taking five courses, playing intramural basketball, and trying to discover who you are and how you fit into the world beyond home and family, you are about as well prepared as you can be for a final exam. But literature is not your major, and you don't speak the language of literary criticism the way English majors do. You chose the course because you have always found reading a comfortable way to compare your own ideas and experiences with those of others, but you would hate to have a class that you took for fun pull your average down. A good exam will make a difference; a poor one will do some damage. You read the first question on the exam and find it incomprehensible. Perhaps you missed a phrase, a verb, some sort of key. But the second time through is no better. It's as if the question were for a different course entirely, on a graduate level. You can't figure out what they are really asking. It's so frustrating! All term long the lecturer has emphasized the readings instead of the technical details. But this question is much too abstract, phrased in such a way that only a literature major could understand. You race through the other questions, but there's no comfort to be found there, either. This is going to be a disaster, one of those exams you write in panic, trying to pile up enough information to show that at least you have done the reading. Now consider this exam from the point of view of an instructor in the English department who is serving as section head in an undergraduate survey course in Renaissance Literature. You suffer the anxieties and frustrations of an interminable apprenticeship as a junior member of a department which, once you finally get your degree, will escort you to the door of the job market. No matter how conscientious and supportive you want to be with your students, and how devoted you are to the poetry of Andrew Marvell, you don't look forward to reading your allotment of sixty rushed, chaotic essays about the material you know and love best. One or two students will have gotten a sense of the poems and essays in their intellectual, social, and political contexts, but most people take the course because it is a distribution requirement that no one ever fails. This year, the professor has asked you to prepare rigorous questions to weed out the good students from the bad, because he hopes to raise the reputation of the course. You set aside the weekend to do the exams, dividing up the work to give each one as fresh a reading as possible. You'll look for familiarity with the texts and lectures, and an appreciation of the professor's approach to the material. You hope the essay questions challenge the best students and inspire the weaker ones. The professor is your thesis advisor, and you don't want him to be disappointed with his undergraduate course. The first two bluebooks are sketchy, leaving out most of the examples you had in mind when you wrote the questions. You are shocked at how little undergraduates retain from their readings and lectures, how unreflective they are about applying the course method to the texts. You're beginning to feel the burden of repeating comments from one bluebook to the next. But after four more uneven ones, you read an exam that is so complete it makes the others seem abysmal. Why was this student able to put it all together when the others could not? Now you have a clearer sense of what is possible, and you feel you were right all along: the exam questions are good. Maybe at the end you can go back over the first few tests and do a better job of explaining what's missing. Then you begin the eighth bluebook. It's unreadable. You try the first sentence over again. Maybe you missed a verb, a phrase, something left out that might make sense of it all. But you can't track the meaning in these scrambled words. Is this student pulling a fast one because he didn't do the work in the course? Your doubts make you guilty. What if he is really trying to say something? And then you get angry. The bluebook is twenty pages of disconnected, illegible scribbling, and a second bluebook is nested inside it with more. You look up at the clock. If you reconstruct this exam word by word, idea by idea, you won't get any of the others done. Why should one student deserve so much of your attention at the expense of the others? You skim through it one more time hoping to find some of those touchstones of a good answer, something you can hold onto and grade. If the rest of the exams are anything like this, the professor is going to feel the course was a failure. |
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