Master's Exams

I studied very hard for master's exams. I was terrified of them. I never, not even after taking them, had any idea what was expected of me on them; I did not know, never having seen any examples of answers, what kind of work would Pass, what would High Pass, what would fail. Are all graduate students so underprepared for an experience that is far more important than coursework in determining who receives a degree?

Actual coursework, even in the survey courses ostensibly designed to prepare students for the MA exam, was not always a helpful guide. Professors in medieval literature, linguistics, and modern Latin American literature gave excellent exams that strongly resembled MA exams, and graded them carefully. Not coincidentally, I felt less afraid of the exams in linguistics and medieval literature (I chose to omit the section on modern LA literature).

On the other hand, the teacher of the Golden Age survey gave exams I can only assume were meant to be jokes. They were ridiculously easy, resembling actual MA exams in this area in exactly no way at all (one of the questions -- I kid you not -- was "Come up with a question. Answer it."), and I am fairly convinced he barely looked at them. The Colonial Literature professor actually allowed her students to talk her out of giving a final that would resemble the MA exam! Instead, we took a take-home essay exam. (Otherwise, I should say, her class was excellent. I doubt I could have passed that portion of the MA exam without it.) The professor teaching Modern Peninsular Literature scared me so badly I decided to audit her class. What I heard of her exams is that they were terrors, much more difficult and more heavily dependent on literary theory than anything appearing on the MA exam. Moreover, about a third of her reading list wasn't even on the MA list.

Be that as it may, April 1996 came along, and I reported to the exam rooms with all the readiness I could muster, aware that I needed to High Pass two of the five exams, and Pass the other three. Seven other people took the MA exam with me that semester. One of them admitted that she was surviving the pressure via prescription tranquilizers.

The first exam day, I took the Colonial Literature exam and felt good about it; I knew perfectly well I hadn't done work worthy of a High Pass, but I thought a Pass seemed reasonable. The second exam day, I took the Linguistics exam in the morning. No worries. Linguistics I can handle.

Then, that afternoon, I got to the Medieval Literature portion of the exam, which I was hoping to High Pass. What I found in the opening section, which consisted of identification of terms and works, shot my confidence to hell in an instant. I can't begin to describe how awful I felt as I saw my degree and my hopes for a further career slipping out of my grasp because of a list of words I couldn't define.

The problem was not wholly mine. The list on this exam was surprisingly different from that on previous exams. It contained one term -- "comedia humanística" -- that even an important critic, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, considered "obscure", as I found when I tried to look it up later! This was all the more terrifying because previous exams had had a very stable list of terms, with which I was quite familiar. Going back to my notes from the survey course later, I could not find even one of the terms I had failed to define.

Well, I had to go on. So I defined the ones I knew, made two random guesses to fill out the number I was required to write about, and tried to marshal my shaken wits to write the essays. I can't remember one word I wrote, or even the questions I chose to answer; I only remember feeling that I was writing utter nonsense, and could do better if only my terror would stop choking my thoughts. Every few minutes, I would go back to that first section, hoping that my brain would shake out something to let me prove I wasn't a fool.

The first words out of anyone's mouth after that exam were "What was with those identifications?" I didn't say it; I simply agreed with it. No one, as best I could tell, felt that he or she had performed adequately on them. The best anyone dared say was, "Well, they can't flunk us all."

I walked home crying and shaking. I felt dazed, beaten, ruined. And I felt betrayed; I knew that I was not deficient in my knowledge of medieval literature, and I could not help thinking that the test had been designed to trip us up rather than anything else. In hindsight, I do not believe that was the intention, but I do believe, still, that the selection of terms was decidedly infelicitous.

I had a free day before I had to go back in to face the last day of testing. I spent that day writing a letter protesting the selection of terms for that exam, and doing my best to justify my protest. (I cannot find this letter, or I would include it.) I did not feel comfortable waiting until the results of the exam were back; assuming I did not pass (and I believed I hadn't), complaining after the fact would just look like ordinary sour grapes. I could not imagine approaching a professor personally to talk about it; that could well torpedo my already-slim exam chances, and I wouldn't have a paper trail to prove I -- and they! -- had been honest.

The MA exam committee, understandably, wasn't happy with me. Both the chair of the exam review committee and the department chair expressed significant disapproval of my letter. They did, however, take me seriously. Most of the terms I couldn't manage were found in one reference book that was indeed part of the exam reading list, although it still seems strange to me that we were apparently required to memorize the entire book (how were we to judge which of the many terms it mentioned were important, and which were not? would this not be the purview of a survey course, the one of which I took did not mention any of these terms?). One term I questioned, however, they admitted they could not find, so everyone taking the MA exam got one identification written off.

And I did manage to pass the MA exam, by the skin of my teeth. Ironically enough, what saved my academic life was precisely my knowledge of medieval thought. On the Golden Age portion of the exam, given on the last exam day, there was a text for exegesis from Don Quixote in which the Don debates the literary merit of the chivalric genre with Sanson Carrasco. The foundation of my exegesis contrasted the Don's medieval outlook with Carrasco's Renaissance-humanistic one. I still think it was a pretty good essay, under the circumstances; I wish I could get it back and look at it. (It's probably been destroyed by now; I don't think the department keeps MA exams.) In any case, it earned me the second High Pass I needed.

The department hands out a little questionnaire at the end of the MA exam. It asks which exam students decided to drop, and why. That's about it. I didn't feel the questionnaire was sufficient for the suggestions I had, so I wrote a friendly, perhaps over-friendly, letter with a number of ideas and put it in the exam committee chair's mailbox. I might as well have dumped it down a black hole. I never heard a thing from anyone about it. I don't think it was ever read; a typo from the reading list I mentioned in it still hadn't been corrected when I left, two and a half years later.

What this whole exercise showed me was that coursework counted for very little, and exams were highly arbitrary measures of progress. After all, of the eight of us who took the exam, only six passed. The other two spent two or more years of their life taking courses, just as I had done, and in the end they had nothing to show for it. As far as I knew, their progress in courses had been satisfactory -- they certainly didn't differ appreciably in intelligence or capacity from me or from the others who passed -- but that apparently didn't matter.

I also learned that the only way to get anywhere in this department with a complaint, concern, or suggestion was to be aggressive and antagonistic. I don't especially like being aggressive or antagonistic. I also think that in a well-run department, antagonism would not be necessary.

On to The Quichua Incident.
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