Yesterday's Gadfly editorial on Harvard and testing appears today, in very slightly modified form, in the National Review Online. We hope it generates some good discussion about accountability in higher education.
Also,? we were just reminded that part of the justification for the new ?no-mandatory-finals? policy (also in the Harvard magazine piece, but we didn't address it in our piece) is that Harvard isn't paying for professional proctors to oversee the exams anymore, due to its shrunken endowment. Professors and teaching assistants don't want to have sit in for the exams themselves, so they have even more incentive to abandon exams altogether. Whether Harvard can't ?afford? exams or instructors are too important to be there when they're given, this is pretty discouraging.
- Mickey Muldoon