Exam Questions, Ouch!

In the fall of 1983, I took a comprehensive exam about legislative politics as part of my graduate studies in political science at the University of Rochester.  I had to pass the exam to proceed to writing a dissertation and thus complete my degree.  So the stakes were pretty high for me.

Professor Richard F. Fenno, Jr., a remarkable human being and the most important scholar of Congress of his generation, wrote the exam questions.  A few months earlier in a seminar taught by Fenno, I had criticized the analytical framework in one of his best books, Congressmen in Committees, probably in the excessively direct, somewhat overbearing, manner that too often is my style.  When I opened up the envelope containing the exam questions that Professor Fenno had written for me, I saw that the gist of the main essay went something like this:  “Some have criticized the analytical framework advanced in Congressmen and Committees.  Come up with something better.”

Ouch!  There may be a lesson here about indiscriminately mouthing off to authority figures.  Hopefully I’ll learn it some day.  But there also is guidance about how to write a superb essay question for an exam.  The question that Fenno came up with was simple, penetrating, and basically unanswerable.  It forced me to grapple with deep conceptual issues about a substantively important topic that was (and remains) central to the academic literature about Congress.  The essay I produced wasn’t very good, but I did pass the test and the experience greatly informed my dissertation about Senate committees and eventually my first book.

So what does this navel gazing have to do with drafting test questions for W&M students?  Well, often professors do need to include on exams questions that gauge whether students are familiar with the basic facts covered by a course.  For instance, the students currently enrolled in my freshman seminar about American political institutions need to know that the filibuster arises from the absence of a motion on the previous question in the standing rules of the Senate.  Certainly there is a role on midterms and finals for multiple choice and “short-answer” questions that essentially test whether students have done the reading and paid attention during lectures.  Facts do matter.

But existing research about learning and intellectual development also indicates that the hundreds of factoids students cram into their heads the night before an exam often disappear somewhere between the end of the test and the time it takes for them to trudge back to the cafeteria for food and another dose of caffeine.  What tend to stick long-term in their brains, in contrast, are conceptual frameworks and generalizations.  Thus, a key purpose of essay questions – including the time that students put into preparing for them – is to force students to think analytically about course topics and to integrate disparate aspects of the material.  Final exam essays, in other words, are more than a tool for measuring student knowledge.  They are vehicles for promoting the most important form of learning that can take place in a college course.

Last week, I gave the students in my freshman seminar one of the essay questions on their final exam ahead of time and let me share it with you.  “Both mass attitudes (the views and opinions of ordinary citizens) and the preferences of political elites (professional politicians, staffers, judges, interest group officials, and so on) clearly matter in the policy-making process in American national government.  But, overall, who tends to have the greater impact on national policy outcomes, ordinary citizens (in the aggregate) or political elites in Washington?”

Ouch!  To a large extent, the question is unanswerable, especially for first-semester freshmen completing their first college class about political science.  But my hope is that the process of thinking through the question will get them to grapple with some basic questions about representation in contemporary American politics, and thereby drive home the essential concepts of my seminar.  At least that’s the goal.  If it doesn’t work, they can blame my mentor, Professor Fenno.