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C Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
With support from the 'W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation

 

 

 

TESTING: IN PRAISE OF AMBIGUITY

In April of 1972, I began my battle with ambiguity. Hired fresh out of graduate school, I walked into an
amphitheater which contained 200 students and launched into an exposition of the essence of anthropology.
Teaching, I thought, was the clear, methodical, unambiguous delivery of ideas; learning was the assimilation of
ideas.

I perceived the burden of clarity to be on the teacher. Students, I assumed, were like sponges—dry, empty,
their very cells eager and prepared to slurp up the moisture of knowledge. I stayed up every night writing and
rewriting lecture notes. Each day I followed the same format: present the principles, give examples, show
relationships with other principles. The students were eager; this was a time when interest in anthropology and
the social sciences in general was high.

Halfway through the semester, students asked when they were going to be given their mid-term exam. I had
forgotten about exams, but quickly wrote 20 essay questions which asked them to integrate various elements of
the course. "Compare and contrast alliance theory and descent theory. Give examples." "Describe and
critique five theories which explain the universal occurrence of a concept of incest in human societies." "What
are the possible evolutionary relationships between Australopithecus robustus in South Africa and Homo habilis in
East Africa?"

I had a graduate assistant to whom I entrusted the results of two hours of frantic scribbling. He called early
Sunday morning, voice bleary with lack of sleep. "I can’t grade these things!" he finally blurted out. "Didn't I
give you a copy of the text?" I asked, with the pitilessness of an 18th-century encyclopedist who assumes all
knowledge can be contained within the covers of a book. He brought the pile of papers that morning,
relinquishing them with a gesture of distaste and relief. He also gave me the pages and pages of criteria he had
developed to grade the exams.

I came out of my own grading session greatly humbled. What was I looking for in the answers? How did |
weigh these various criteria? That night I slept restlessly. I dreamed of a vast map criss-crossed with roads,
over which a beacon of light danced. I awoke from the dream in great excitement. The map was knowledge;
the light was teaching; my function was to illuminate specific roads and cities. I had been too broad, too
ambiguous, casting light over huge regions, entire nations. I called my graduate assistant the next morning and
told him I had resolved the problem. I was going to develop less ambiguous questions, be more precise in
pinpointing the exact unit of information required for a correct response. He said he had just changed his major
to computer science.

Ten years later, I had reduced ambiguity by at least a factor of 10. I prepared study guides, like maps over
my dream landscape; I developed an enormous bank of questions (true-false, multiple choice, and identification),
keyed to the study guides, which could be graded by computer. I knew that this type of testing did not tap all
the functions of learning but perceived it to be primarily useful in introductory classes in which the main goal
was learning the names, dates, and concepts of a discipline. To give students practice in writing and creative,
analytical thinking, I developed the film essay (described in Vol. VI, No. 26 of Innovation Abstracts).

And then something happened to change my thinking about the "objective" tests I had developed. Over the
years I was constantly refining my questions. Recognizing that many questions might still be ambiguous, |
always allowed a discussion period after the exams had been graded: if students gave a reasonable explanation
of why they had given a "wrong" response, I gave them credit for it and used their input to refine my
questions. Finally, it dawned on me that the most valuable aspect of my "objective" tests was the
opportunity—provided by ambiguous questions—for students to exercise their analytic and imaginative skills in
confronting and organizing knowledge. I then began to work directly toward planned ambiguity.

Planned Ambiguity

Planned ambiguity is a technique that has to be learned by students. The following is a simplified modus
operandi:

(1) Design a text study guide which requires students to make an active hunt for specific units of information
and which leads them, like a road map, across difficult terrain.

 

 

 

y; Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712