Assessment is a tricky business – and it is increasingly a business, with outside organizations that require us to assess and those that can advise us on assessment. Some schools even have assessment officers or even assessment offices who/that are responsible for helping faculty to devise and revise assessment measures. This push toward more and better assessment is motivated by the desire to measure what goes well in college and what does not go well – and to determine what sort of difference a college education makes in your life, how it makes that difference, and how that difference can best be made. With so much money at stake – and students going into heavy debt in order to get a college education – it makes sense that we would do this. But money aside, we in the Humanities place intrinsic value on what we do (meaning that we value it for its own sake) and so want to do the best possible job that we can in helping you to understand the Humanities and, in doing so, helping you to gain the insight and skills and increased literacy and awareness that comes with such understanding.
Our primary assessment tool in Humanties I and II (HUMN 2001 and 2002) is an extemporaneous essay exam. Typically, you are asked to write an essay or two in response to a question that you may – but often do not exactly – know in advance. In this essay you compare and contrast cultures, and you analyze specific artistic productions of a culture. You receive a numeric grade that is itself a number formed from three numeric grades given independently by three different professors. In general, you receive no specific feedback (i.e., no feedback directed toward your essay and its particular strengths and weaknesses) and so have no clear sense of why you earned the grade you earned. There are reasons for this: with respect to the final score, it can (for a variety of reasons) get tricky when the exact grade of each instructor is known, and with respect to the lack of comments, it can get tricky if all three instructors comment and, more importantly, there is not enough time to comment on so many essays (many instructors have to two or three sections and so have to read eight to a hundred-and-twenty of these) in a timely fashion (since midterm and final grades are due so quickly, and, to complicate matters further, the team has to grade one stack and then quickly pass it along to teammates).
There are things about this process that I value. I think that the essay does indeed require you to do what we want you to be able to do as a result of this course, and I think that it shows whether or not and to what extent you have done this. However, it comes with certain consequences. First, the grading is not transparent. Second, there is no clear means for helping you to improve. Third, it is very difficult for an outsider to quickly assess this assessment. In other words, the essay has you do many things all at once, and each assessed part is not clearly broken out. This also makes it hard for students: students leave points on the table in part because they get caught up with composing and in the process skip over some of thinking for which we are looking. (We see a lot of filler – or things that might make for a nice Composition essay but are not necessary for our Humanities exams.) What is worse, you might not know whether you’re doing this, and if so, where and how you are doing it (“it” meaning ‘leaving points on the table’).
The assessment tool that we are attempting to devise – with your help – attempts to get you to do all the things that you should be doing in the essay, and it breaks them out into discrete parts. Thus, as Elizabeth noted in class, it is indeed an essay broken into parts. This should, we hope, have many advantages. First, it makes clear what should be there, so that if you skip some part of it, you do so knowingly. Thus, for instance, you shouldn’t lose points for failing to define terms in an essay, or making the historical context (background events and trends) clear, or not having a thesis – although many students do fail to provide those things in their essays. Second, students sometimes write unbalanced essays, meaning that they put too much into one part of the essay and so lose out on the points to be earned elsewhere. This sheet should help you to balance what you write. Third, you won’t have to worry about compositional skills, such as transitions and topic sentences and they like. Fourth, it is easier to practice the assessment with these sheets, whereas there’s no real practice (with feedback) with the essays. Fifth, the grading will be transparent: it will be clear where you do – or fail to – earn points. Lastly, since each sheet will focus on a specific discipline, we’ll each grade the one focused on our discipline – so we won’t each grade every one – and this will make grading go faster. In fact, we plan to grade as a team so that we can ask each other questions and calibrate our grading as we go. This is a large part of what will enable us to grade assessments throughout the semester and not just as midterm and final.
The assessments will still be tough, as should be clear from the bit of practice that we’ve done. You’ll have to know your stuff – historical context, period concepts, thematic questions, the focus pieces, and how to analyze those pieces. But our hope is that what we’re doing gives you greater awareness of what is going on, more control over what you are doing, and a more transparent sense of what you are graded on and how and why you earn the grade that you earn.
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