I'll take the physical challenge

The card says...
    By Dave Oppenheim

At a university which offers an education as diverse as Yale's, one should be prepared to find a great deal of variety in the type of learning experiences offered to undergraduates. To be expected are in-depth seminars on Middle English poetry, close analyses of the United States electoral system, and intensive classes on physical chemistry. More of a surprise—to me at least—is Trivia 101, which the Blue Book calls "Sociology 115."

Don't get me wrong. This course keeps up a pretty good pretense of being a legitimate exercise in the pursuit of knowledge. The lectures are informative, highlighting significant themes and cause-effect relationships between seminal events in America's past and the nature of its citizens' interaction with one another. The veil is not lifted, in fact, until test time rolls around. At that point, however, any illusion that the class is a real college course flies out the window. Professor Joseph Soares tears off the mask of the smiling, bearded academic to reveal Alex Trebek.

Rather than requiring his 500 or so contestants to use critical thinking skills, like professors who run academic courses rather than game shows, he asks questions like "What percentage of the people living in the United States were either foreign-born or had parents who were?"; "On average, what percentage of adult television viewers can remember the names of any commodities advertised on their TV the previous night?"; and my favorite, "Who made the decisions about interior decorating in George Washington's house?" I'll take "Puritans whose names begin with the letter `Q'" for 10 points, Joe.

Upon leaving this particular examination with only the consolation prizes—the Ginsu knives and the Amana freezer—a friend of mine remarked to me that we had just taken "an eighth-grade test." While this reflection was good for a hearty laugh at the time, little did we realize the ramifications of the mindlessness of this exam.

Namely, if we weren't exercising our brains, the TAs who graded them had to think even less. To prevent any pesky, rebellious grader from renegade thinking, gamemaster Soares had given each TA a detailed guide of what catch phrases he wanted to see regurgitated for each question. Any answers not phrased exactly as the card said were automatically wrong. Especially if, God forbid, they weren't phrased in the form of a question.

This rigidity led to a predictably farcical situation. Head TA William Holt, for example, made the professor's guidelines his Bible. No deviations were tolerated by big, bad Bill. At least one respondent in his section to the question, "In which decade did the first department stores appear in the United States?" answered "1880-1890," only to hear the buzzer and be informed that, so sorry, the answer was "1880s." All those people who were alive between 1880 and 1890, of course, knew that they were living in the 1460s. At least those who weren't too good at math.

Holt proved that he could be cryptic as well as unyielding. On my exam, he appended the notation "T.S. Eliot" to my two- sentence answer to the question, "Summarize the organic conservative perspective on the relation of culture to social class," and docked me two of 10 points. I wondered if he was accusing me of plagiarizing the author on my exam. I was flattered that he liked my sentence structure so much, but less happy about the deduction. When I asked my own TA about it (as he graciously regraded my entire exam in a decidedly more intelligent way—the rebel), he said that Soares had mentioned that test-takers could mention T.S. Eliot as one significant proponent of the organic conservative perspective, but were by no means obliged to do so. My TA found it "ridiculous" that Holt had penalized people for that omission. I couldn't have said it better myself.

The danger of an alleged academic pursuit such as Trivia 101 is that it breeds goose-stepping TAs like Bill Holt. If 500 students aren't expected to use critical thinking, how can we really expect more from 10 graduate students? The next step, of course, is mass participation in the Yale Daily News theology debate. The madness must stop.

Although one could argue that these observations may be more appropriate for a forum such as the Yale College Course Critique, the fact that they haven't updated any of their text since 1995 poses something of a problem. Besides, I'll offer a trigger-happy fellow Herald columnist a deal: he can use this column for the Course Critique in exchange for a Colt 45. Either kind.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• What's so bad about a good time?, 2/12/99
• Calling Oliver Stone, 1/29/99
• Liberating Yale from the cable monopoly, 1/15/99

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