theorywatch

Since I don’t have to think about collections right now (given that 37 other people in KM/LIS 5990 are doing such an excellent job on that!), I thought I might think about comps, as the next administration of our comprehensive examination is coming up shortly. (Not my favorite topic, by the way, as I’m very much a fan of the portfolio or thesis “experience,” but not everyone else is, so I understand the necessity for having this option available.)

The following is taken from the SLIS Student Handbook:

Development of the Examination

“SLIS faculty generate a new set of questions each semester. Topics for the examination are not “course specific” but allow the student an opportunity to integrate content from several course areas and additional appropriate learning experiences. The questions focus upon six identified areas that all students are expected to master:

* the philosophical and theoretical foundations of our field

* the organization and control of information resources

* the provision and analysis of user services

* the management of information agencies

* acquiring and accessing information

* the application of research methods within our field.

Each individual question will require synthesis of knowledge from at least two of these areas.”

I don’t know whether students realize this, but every semester each tenured and tenure-track faculty member is requested by the Graduate Studies Committee to contribute at least three questions to the pool of questions for discussion (and, usually, modification) by the entire faculty as potential candidates as the questions posed for that semester’s examination. Only a few of these questions will “survive” this process, and those are the ones that will appear on the comprehensive exam for that semester.

There has been much angst lately over these questions (and the exam itself), so my suggestion for Comps 2.0 would be to require each student taking a “comprehensive examination” to submit three questions based on the “rubric” above to the faculty, and they would pass or fail based on the excellence of these questions they ask the faculty. In fact, I would do this as a semester-long “course” in Desire2Learn (since students have to be enrolled in order to take comps anyway), and the participating students could debate the merits of possible questions with each other and with any participating faculty before the deadline to place the questions in the dropbox. The questions would, of course, be submitted using the “comps administration number” system currently used to preserve student anonymity during the process, which seems to work pretty well. The closing of the dropbox would signal that the examination period was over.

This would involve having a “question bank” of all the questions (both successful and unsuccessful!) asked by students for the exam over the, say, past five years, so those particular questions could not be asked again by other students (at least not in the same or very similar way) while those questions were still “in the bank.” Interestingly, one of the things that might trigger “the defense” process might be the asking of very similar new questions by two or more individuals during the same semester, as further discussion might then be required to determine what differentiates those questions. But I’m still working on how “the defense” process might work in this scenario, and what might constitute “failure” in this kind of zetetic process.

Why do I think this is an improvement over the current examination procedure? Because none of the pretty good answers that one learns during graduate school will be nearly as useful in one’s professional life as the ability to ask the really good questions. Why do I think this would never be acceptable as a form of final assessment here? Now, that’s a really good question….