The Test

Last week I went to one of my classes ready to do what students typically do in classes: ready to take a midterm exam. I walked into the room and took my seat. The professor had a stack of stapled tests sitting on his desk. Multiple choice, short answer, and one essay to round things out. Simple enough. I took out a number two pencil and a pen, and started to run all of the likely questions through my brain, a last dress rehearsal.

Then something different happened. My professor stood in front of the class and told us that we had a choice. We could take the test by ourselves and he would give each person that did so a total of seven extra credit points. Or, we each had the option to pick a partner, anyone that we wanted, and to take the test as a team. However, there would be one drawback: teams would have five points deducted from their overall score.

Immediately, the class full of both engineering and business majors did what both engineers and businesspeople do: everyone analyzed the options. In the end, I decided that the benefits of a partner outweighed the obvious incentives to take the exam on my own (plus, my girlfriend’s roommate had asked to be in my group, and so social niceness dictated that that was probably the only real plausible option).

One week later, when we showed up to class, the professor had posted the grade distribution on the board, and it was as follows:


After allowing us time to look over the results, he asked who had done a better job. So, who had?

Just looking at the raw scores, the two person teams had in fact scored higher. However, when the point curves are applied, the final scores for the individuals far exceed those of the teams. So which one matters more?

As the professor went on to explain, it’s really a matter of defining the purpose of the examination. If we suppose that its purpose is to get the best grade, then the individuals did the best. In contrast, if we determine that its principle purpose is to promote learning and to ascertain how much of the information is understood, then the teams performed better for two reasons. First, they had a higher raw score, which shows that they answered more of the information correctly. And, in the process of having to explain their answers to their teammates, each team member was likely to have had to display a deeper understanding of the material. So, if learning is the core purpose of the exercise, then one would likely conclude that the teams benefitted more and therefore did better in the end.

However, the problem is that too often, in school and in society, we don’t appreciate the process, and we don’t often relate our results back to any fundamental purpose. As my professor explained, we have created a “culture of victory over excellence”. Students in the end are more concerned with the final grade, with the final GPA, than they are with real learning. And, as I alluded to before, society seems to share this mentality.

Think about many of the core systems at work within our society: Wall Street, our legal system, or even our politics. Does each of these systems reflect their core purposes?

The stock market was created as a method to generate needed capital for growing business. Investors provided money that helped fund necessary expansion, and in return hoped to receive a healthy compensation for the adopted risk. At its core, it was about creating something and growing the economy as a whole, to the benefit of us all. But today that purpose is not readily reflected on Wall Street. Stocks are no longer seen as long-term investments, or as partial ownership stakes in strong companies, but they are instead consumed by the concept of profit.

We have developed various concepts such as short trading and day trading that effectively create nothing. Board of directors promote company practices that cut costs and increase profits rather than ones that generate jobs or encourage only smart growth. Company stock prices increase when CEOs announce job cuts, and the most attractive stocks represent companies with unproven potential for growth, rather than companies that have established consistent revenues. Our emphasis is on the price of a stock at the end of the day, and not the state of the company itself.

Our legal system is no better. We have lost a sense of its true purpose to adjudicate cases of potential wrongdoing and ensure personal liberties. In a society where doctors face a lawsuit every four years on average, and where civil litigation consumes and constricts company actions more so than any economic factor, you have to question whether or not our legal framework even still knows what its purpose is. Whether it is still a part of the solution, or if it has somehow come to advance misuses that threaten our society more than the evils it was designed to combat.

And the partisanship of our politics could be no further from its purpose. It has devolved into an entity that does not uniformly represent all constituents, but instead it is fueled by ideology and representatives only represent those special interest groups that put them into power. I am currently watching Barack Obama speak in Columbia, Missouri and he explains that we need “a smarter government”. But I don’t know that it needs more intelligence, because it seems well capable of achieving its own ends. Instead, it need only be smart enough to relearn what it was intended to do. It needs to relearn and reconnect with its purpose.

At the end of his discussion of our exam, my professor concluded that “it is your responsibility that when you are given the opportunity to operate under a different paradigm that you connect with its purpose”. He never answered which group had done a better job. Instead, although unspoken, his message was that we needed to create our own paradigm within which to answer that question. Each student needed to surmise his or her own definition of purpose. And so too must America.