In an unprecedented shift of institutional emphasis, Lawrence University President Jill Beck will announce that Lawrence plans on removing tests by 2010, with a gradual phasing out of objective criteria of evaluation altogether by 2020.
Final exams will now be replaced by online surveys, which students will be required to complete in order to graduate.
Under the new plan, students will be required to complete online surveys and political action projects in an equal distribution between earth sciences, computer and quantitative division, gender studies, feminism, other vaguely legitimate sciences, psychology, and anthropology.
While “coursework” in the traditional sense may be a thing of the past, students will nonetheless be required to meet with a tutor from the Center for Teaching and Learning once a week.
“Tutoring is beneficial no matter what stage of the process you’re in,” said Geoff Gajewski, CTL director. “There’s nothing wrong with going to a tutor, just to see how you’re doing, and to make sure you’re keeping up with your surveys.”
Students will also be required to design 15 different online surveys per term, and, according to Beck, that’s where the challenge comes in:
“No student may repeat a survey that has already been e-mailed around to the student body, but it must be a slight variation on a previous survey,” Beck explained.
For instance, if one were going to write a survey on organic gardening, which has already been done, one would have to add a catchy academic term like “deconstructionist” or “gender politics of” or “music and,” and leave it up to the rest of the students to catch the nuance.
“I’ve already gotten a heads-up on this new mode of scholarship. I was just testing the system with my ‘average American man’ survey last week, but a bunch of gullible students actually took the test. Heh. : )” blogged Professor Peter Glick.
Testing to be a thing of the past -dlh
