Stephen Vasciannie
SOME YEARS AGO, I worked at a law firm in New York. Almost all the lawyers there were routinely recruited from Ivy League universities. They were serious types, willing to work through the night quite regularly, if this was required for a given project.
The firm, however, took no chances. Although its first-year lawyers were top students from the top universities, the firm insisted that these lawyers should attend one two-hour class per week on specified legal topics, for much of the year. The lawyers dutifully obliged.
If you missed a class, you could correct your delinquency by viewing the class on video. And the firm kept a record of all those absentees who failed to borrow appropriate videos. Now here is my point: In most instances, the absentees were very reluctant to borrow the videos. The class was not regarded as a waste of time, but watching the video of the class was widely perceived as quite a pointless exercise.
IMPERSONAL LEARNING
This said something to me about the way people learn. My untrained - but not inexperienced - guess is that most of us learn best in a group setting with the possibility of interaction. But classroom learning at the tertiary level can only be a supplement - because there is so much material to be covered at university or in a professional setting, the primary source of learning must necessarily be through personal reading.
The lawyers at the firm were fully aware of this; whether instinctively or by experience, they opted to ignore the videos, but embraced the live classes and the reading prescribed in those classes. And yet, sometimes it seems that in our quest to become a part of the information technology age, and to validate new gadgets, we tend to forget that impersonal methods of teaching will usually come in at third place - behind personal exchanges in a group and reading - as means for the effective transmission of knowledge.
TESTING METHODS
On a related matter, I come to the table with some old-fashioned views about testing students. The contrasting, probably fashionable, view is that examinations are not the best way of testing student knowledge, and some may well suggest that they are not even a good way of testing. And so, at many universities across the world, and within secondary schools as well, increasing emphasis is placed on 'course work'.
This may be a mistake. The examination constitutes the best way of verifying that students have actually acquired the knowledge and the methods of learning that are required in a given course. To be sure, where one wishes to test research skills then reliance on a single examination may be inappropriate; but, where the purpose of an exercise is to assess knowledge of a particular area, then the examination tends to be more accurate.
PROS OF EXAMS
Examinations have at least three other advantages over course work. First, by requiring students to present themselves for testing on a certain date, the examination forces each candidate to concentrate sharply on the task at hand. This is probably more in keeping with the competitive working environment, where pressure tends to come in phases, than with some other forms of assessment.
Secondly, the properly conducted examination will not be open to questions concerning what the student actually knows. In the era of the Internet - and especially with the inexhaustible sources of information that this implies - it is all too easy for a student to pull down information for a course work essay and pass it off as his or her own. No examiner will know about all the sources; and some students will take their chances with plagiarism. I have seen one of my columns for The Gleaner - on grade inflation - available for sale online to students.
Finally, we should stick with examinations because the top universities all around the world value them. If you can get your degree by course work only, how will anyone know that you actually did the assignments yourself? Could you not have paid someone to do it for you? Or could you not have been the teacher's pet, and sailed through as a star when you really can produce only mediocre work?
Stephen Vasciannie is a professor at the University of the West Indies and a consultant in the Attorney-General's chambers.
