Let me just say that I dislike, nay, despise tests. That’s not good for someone in academia, I suppose. I don’t look forward to taking my comprehensive examinations once I’m in a doctoral program, but worse than that, I don’t even like the fact that I have to take a midterm exam in my early church history course tomorrow. Even when I ace tests I feel queasy about them. It’s like this test, this document probing my brain for answers, is also prodding me with a stress-charged taser gun.

I like to talk about the material. I like to write about the material. But I don’t like to be forced into this awful, heart-pounding sweatfest demanding my memory recall, while at the same time blocking my memory and causing feelings of great inadequacy. I like to learn. I like to read. But I don’t like spending hours upon hours poring over pages of notes, both in paper and on the computer. I don’t like trying to come up with a “study guide” when there is none provided and it becomes so long and cumbersome that it just intimidates me with the amount of information that I feel I have to memorize.

Okay, what I’m describing is not the scenario of every test I take, nor do I even have that many tests. But still, they irk me. If I ever make it to the other side of graduate studies, I don’t think I’ll give tests or exams to my students. Quizzes, maybe. Papers, short and long. Perhaps even blogging, which is becoming an assignment trend now. But no tests.

Well, it’s back to the study guide for me!

N.B. I should add that the reason that I am so stressed out about tests is because it only allows you two hours or less to condense tons of material, whereas a paper gives you weeks of preparation time to craft your words. I worry because I care about the grade. I only care about the grade because I want to get into a good doctoral program. I want to get into a good doctoral program so that I will be well-trained to serve my future students as a teacher and, I hope, a mentor as well as to engage in scholarship in general. I would rather our whole system dropped grades, if that were possible, because it causes me to focus on meeting the requirements rather than learning the material. But there’d be no easy way for the big schools to weed out the masses of applicants.