I gave a midterm exam. It was timed (one hour and 45 min) and students could not use notes. Midterms here are called CATs. Unfortunately this has nothing to do with cats, but instead stands for Continuous Assessment Test. The idea is that it is part of the assessment that goes on during the term as opposed to the final. Final exams count for 60% of students' final grades here. CATs, which include homework assignments as well as midterms, make up the rest.
I haven't given an exam like this since the 1990's. I have never given such a test at College of the Atlantic, my home institution. Such tests have never made sense given my learning goals for my courses. I want students to learn to work carefully and deliberately, to consult their own notes, and to be able to figure things out by reading books. All of these skills are penalised on timed, closed-notes tests. Challenging homework assignments and open-notes tests have always made more sense to me.
I am writing this while I sit in the front of the classroom while 44 students take my midterm. (I am jotting this down on a note pad. I typed in into the blog two days later.) I fear I made the exam too short and/or easy. Halfway through the allotted time and a few people are already done. It is sometimes difficult for me to predict what students will find hard and how long assignments will take. I maybe have miscalculated. I am still getting to know students here and am learning their strengths and weaknesses.
Except for one class that I taught while in grad school, the last time I wrote and gave timed, in-class tests was when I taught high school math and physics from 1991-93. I tried to make tests entertaining. I would include jokes sometimes and also pictures and cartoons. This was before the world wide web, so my source of illustrations was usually the Village Voice, to which I had a subscription.
When giving a test in class, there is the question of what to do in class when the students are taking the test. Today I spent a while fretting and revising my far-too-long to-do list, and then I started writing this. My writing has been interrupted a few times by students raising their hands with questions. I then try and walk to their desks, which is not an easy task since the room is packed full with desks and students. There is little room in which to manoeuvre.
When teaching high school I would usually bring a book to read. One of my closest friends, an English teacher, encouraged me to do so, arguing that it set a good example for the students. I didn't need much encouraging. It seemed like the natural thing to do.
In the spring of 1993, my last year teaching high school, I remember heading to my classroom to give a test and, needing something to read, I grabbed my Norton Anthology of Poetry. I had it from my tenth grade poetry class. Now I was bringing it to read while tenth graders took a physical science test.
I gave out the test and flipped through the book and landed on "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. Somehow I had never seen the poem before. I was just 23. I started reading and was captivated. It is hard to explain the feeling I had encountering---experiencing---Howl for the first time in a room full of tenth grade boys, wearing ties and dutifully taking a physics test. It was one of those surreal moments where things are suddenly so unexpectedly strange and awesome that reality seems to crackle and buzz. I read line after line and kept looking up at my students. I felt almost awkward reading such a poem in their presence, and yet somehow it seemed perfect.
And so I look up now at my physics students. Two-thirds of the time is up and about half of the students are finished. I think about this strange university, which of course is not strange at all---just strange to me. I don't know if I like exams, but they are a fact of life here.
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