Testing, Testing

People often characterize philosophy as having no right or wrong answers; philosophers tend to push back at this. Even someone like me, who isn’t especially sympathetic to the view that there exist objectively true answers to most interesting philosophical questions still tells students that even if there are no right or wrong answers in philosophy, there are certainly better and worse ones.

Except, of course, in logic, where there are straightforwardly correct or incorrect responses to all sorts of inquiries and problems, even if those answers are no more than filling in the right boxes in a crossword puzzle or a sudoku game.

Consequently, when I teach logic, I routinely make students take traditional tests; and while I haven’t succumbed to subjecting them to multiple-choice scantron examinations, I do require them to sit there, with sharpened pencils, and answer a bunch of questions I’ve prepared that I will then read and grade according to whether they produce answers to questions with the answers I expect them to.

I’m guilty here of the so-called “banking model of education,” where you make deposits of knowledge into students’ heads and then withdraw that knowledge at a later date—hopefully, with interest.

I justify this less-than-ideal teaching strategy by telling myself that I’m not simply putting in and taking out the very same facts; I am, I hope, providing students with skills that they can then apply to novel problems, even if they are problems quite like ones they’ve presumably seen before, on the homework and in class.

I’ve graded about half the tests, though, and am pretty surprised by how badly many of the students are doing. I had thought that I’d gone overboard in my explanations, even giving a practice test and the opportunity to review and ask questions to their hearts’ content. They said they were ready, but they’re bombing out right and left.

So if my task was to prepare them to succeed, I’m failing this test, too.