The University’s Best Weapon Against A.I.: The 14th Century...In 1355 the arts faculty at the University of Paris forbade masters to lecture at a slow speed that would have allowed students to copy their words verbatim.You can still see traces of that old academic culture in Ph.D. programs, in which students have to pass oral exams and defend their thesis in a viva voce (“with the living voice”) in conversation with their examiners. Cambridge and Oxford, the inspiration for most early U.S. colleges, did not meaningfully adopt written exams until the 18th and 19th centuries, half a millennium after they were founded. The shift to original, written student work was partly in response to instruction in increasingly technical fields and partly due to the fact that written work made it easier to teach more students.Even in the U.S. our earliest colleges followed the tradition of oral examinations. Emphasis on students writing compositions did not spread until we started copying German research universities in the 1870s. Freshman comp, the standard U.S. writing class, shifted to expect more unique and expressive content from students after World War II.All of which is to say that our current practices around student writing are not part of some ancient tradition. Which assignments are written and which are oral has shifted over the years. It is shifting again, this time away from original student writing done outside class and toward something more interactive between student and professor or at least student and teaching assistant.Though the return of the blue book exam is one sign of this change, a number of older practices for assessing student learning are being revived....
There's still a chance they might learn something, but only in a harder school.
No comments:
Post a Comment