You are a number, sitting amid other numbers, some higher, some lower. In a fleeting moment of barbaric clarity, you remind yourself that humans are animals, and as an animal, you will face competition. Thank God you live in a society that values competition! You will be ranked and filed, pasted with a number that quantifies how much you’ve learned. The main mode to achieve a high number is to do well on a few big tests throughout the semester.
The test will last one hour and it will cover five chapters. It’s only 25 percent of your grade. No big deal. There’ll be three other tests just like it. You no longer question how several hundred pages of material can be tested in an hour. The answer is irrelevant. You must still take the test.
The test went well, or so you say. Somehow you felt intelligent, bubbling in the multiple-choice questions expertly, recalling facts you heard in class, saw on a PowerPoint or read in the book. But now that you reflect back on it, you feel silly. You feel silly that your education is composed of such a shallow assessment of intellect. You wish you’d been given a project, a presentation, a tangible anything that was produced from a semester’s worth of work.
Time has made you numb to all the bizarre learning strategies you partake in. In calculus, your homework is graded by an online robot called “WebAssign,” in which you work integrals and differentials until your paper is mess of scratch work. The robot is courteous enough to give you several attempts and motivate you with vapid hints. You relent to the robot’s demands.
Never before did learning feel this superficial. You expect to learn something by sliding a yellow highlighter over a paragraph of text. You name drop in short answer questions. You make cute flashcards. You memorize and regurgitate. You’ve done it all. Testing has made you this way.
You want to do and make beautiful things one day, but you’ve been told you need the ambition to conform to the system as it stands: a collection of high-stakes exams taken in sittings rarely longer than two hours. It’s the way it’s done around here, and you know an op-ed in the student newspaper isn’t going to change that.
“The system’s far from perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got,” a teacher reminds you on your way out of class one day. You shrug in agreement, walk across the Quad, and peer out into the world that continues to turn, praying that a change will come.
Tarif Haque is a sophomore majoring in computer science. His column runs biweekly on Thursdays.
