Premium Essay

Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts

In:

Submitted By valg8
Words 524
Pages 3
Language Critique Assignment “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts”

Education is not simply learning things; it is learning to learn things. In his classic essay “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts” William G. Perry Jr. of Harvard University in 1963, using a mix of anecdote and analysis, humor and seriousness, considers the different kinds of answers students tend to give on exams and how they reflect on different kinds and ways of thinking. Perry Jr. categorizes, questions, and attacks the academic arrogance that surrounds the age-old learning style of curriculum based instruction that is used throughout school systems. He uses key terms such as bull and cow. Besides, he uses emotive language that makes the essay rich of knowledge.

He discusses the problem of the theory of knowledge in terms of grading "bull" and what he names "cow." The incident that impelled him to write is interesting.
Briefly, one Mr. Metzger (a pseudonym for a Harvard student, class of '47) rocketed to celebrity/notoriety after impulsively and for no apparent reason taking an exam under the name Smith in a social science course for which he was not registered and which he had never attended. Cheerfully, I gather, he wrote an essay discussing a book he had never read.
The scandal resulted when, because a real Smith was absent, Metzger's essay was graded and returned-with an A - . It is relevant to the resultant controversy that a conscientious friend of Metzger who had taken the course received a C+.

Perry rose to the defense of the hapless section leader responsible by examining what he saw as the fundamental purpose of the university: that it "should teach students how to think; not only in their own fields but in fields outside their own.... Here then, good bull [such as Metzger had written] appears not as ignorance at all but as an aspect of knowledge." Perry intentionally creates

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind.Doc

...87 .,~. Peer Tutoring and the "Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth A. Bruffee The beginnings of peer tutoring lie in practice, not in theory. A decade or so ago, faculty and administrators in a few institutions around the country became aware that, increasingly, students entering college had difficulty doing as well in academic studies as their abilities suggested they should be able to do. Some of these students were in many ways poorly prepared academically. Many more of them, however, had on paper excellent secondary preparation. The common denominator among the poorly prepared and the apparently well prepared seemed to be that, for cultural reasons we may not yet fully under­ stand, all these students had difficulty adapting to the traditional or "normal" conventions of the college classroom. One symptom of the difficulty was that many of these students refuSed .help when it was offered. Mainly, colleges offered ancillary programs staffed by professionals. Students avoided them in droves. Many solutions to this problem were suggested and tried, from mandated programs to sink-or-swim. One idea that seemed at the time among the most exotic and unlikely (that is, in the jargon of the Sixties, among the most "radical") turned out to work rather well. Some of us had guessed that students were refusing the help we were providing because it seemed to them merely an extension of the work, the expectations, and above all the social structure of traditional classroom learning. And...

Words: 5727 - Pages: 23