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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) 50-63



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Spirituality and Pedagogy:
Faith and Reason in the Age of Assessment

Anita Houck


I would like to begin with what may be the most notorious assessment story of all time. It has been preserved for us by William G. Perry, Jr., who considered the case in a 1963 essay entitled "Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology." The case concerns a Harvard undergraduate who has come down to us only as "the Abominable Mr. Metzger '47." The pseudonymous Mr. Metzger, a junior math student, happened to meet a friend who was just about to sit for a test in Harvard's Great Hall. At this point I pick up Perry's narration.

Metzger greeted him and extended appropriate condolences. He inquired, too, what course his friend was being tested in. "Oh, Soc. Sci. something-or-other." "What's it all about?" asked Metzger, and this, as Homer remarked of Patroclus, was the beginning of evil for him.

"It's about Modern Perspectives on Man and Society and All That," said his friend. "Pretty interesting, really."

"Always wanted to take a course like that," said Metzger. "Any good reading?"

"Yeah, great. There's this book--" his friend did not have time to finish.

"Take your seats please," said a stern voice beside them. The idle conversation had somehow taken the two friends to one of the tables in the Great Hall. Both students automatically obeyed; the proctor put blue-books before them; another proctor presented them with copies of the printed hour-test.

Mr. Metzger remembered afterwards a brief misgiving that was suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of curiosity and puckish glee. He wrote "George Smith" on the blue-book, opened it, and addressed the first question. 1

What makes the case so interesting to Perry is of course what followed. When Metzger got the corrected blue book some days later, he found that though his objective work had rated a D, his essay had received not the C+ that went to his friend and many others in the class, but a stunning A-, along with the comment, "Excellent work. Could you have pinned these observations down a bit more closely?"

What Mr. Metzger did, among other things, is to show quite starkly what's at stake when we undertake to assess the quality of a student's thought and expression. His exploit forced the T.A. who graded the work, the professor who taught [End Page 50] the course, and eventually the Administrative Board of Harvard College, which took up the disciplinary case, to confront not only a good deal of embarrassment, but also some of the central questions we face all the time as teachers. What is it that we value in our students' thought and expression? What do we hope students will gain from their education? How can we tell what they've learned? And how do we respond to what they show us of their learning?

These are the questions that the process of assessment asks us to take up. It's easy to lose sight of them, I think, because in the years since Mr. Metzger's abomination, the language and bureaucracy surrounding assessment have changed a great deal. In the United States at least, the world of assessment now looms as the realm of standardized tests graded by scanning machines, of clearly stated objectives developed for units of analysis rather than open-ended conversations and well-written essays in which the spirit may blow as it wills. Much of the discussion is not particularly concerned with individual students at all, but with departments, programs, and schools that are expected to formulate mission statements expressing their overall goals, which then serve as standards against which student progress must somehow be measured. In institutions of higher learning, public and private, religiously affiliated and nonsectarian, graduate and undergraduate, the pressure to assess comes in large part from regional accrediting agencies, which in turn feel the pressure of what they...

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