Sometimes Hollywood makes movies with different endings.  Then they might test them on different audiences to get some idea of what people thought.  Let’s try that with the ends of the classes we teach.

We have abandoned the effort to teach a coherent story.  Our courses too often are mere fragments of an outline, with no real beginning and no real end.   That’s O.K., we say to ourselves, because we are preparing our students for the tests they will be taking.  The tests chiefly seek answers, as opposed to explanations, and so it’s all right for us to give them what they need.  This is so close to collapsing everything to the test that we are not surprised when schools are found to have cheated, crossing an ever thinner and more important line.

But suppose the exam didn’t have to be standardized across the entire state or even a school district.  Suppose it could be based on the work of a given teacher with a given class.  Suppose moreover that it wasn’t in essence a multiple-choice test, but gave students many opportunities to explain things.

By shifting the scope of the exam to the content covered, we put our money on the judgement of teachers and their sense for what it takes for students to come to understand the material.  Instead of racing across a broad sweep of things making sure students have been exposed to the breadth of the material at the cost of any depth –the oft-repeated phrase ‘a mile-wide and an inch deep’ comes to mind –classes can dwell and work things out, taking the time to make sense of things.  And by shifting the weight of exams from multiple-choice questions to essays, or perhaps even presentations or projects, we would more fully nurture student voice.  They would be explaining themselves.  Surely nurturing voice and understanding is at the heart of the purpose of an education.

That’s the way end of course exams worked for me in the old days.  But these were not national exams.  If we want some sort of broader standard, one that went beyond the judgement of a single teacher, we would have to scrap such an old-fashioned approach wouldn’t we?  Actually, I don’t think so.  The English have an approach to national exams that goes pretty far along the way to an essay test that reflects what was taught in a given class.  They use external readers.  The person who grades a paper would be from another school district.  This gives a measure of objectivity to the judgement of whether a student has explained things well or not.  Sadly, there is no promise that state-wide exams and high stakes testing would move in such a direction.  No Hollywood ending here.