2.9 Power/Assessment: Exam Resisters’ Manifesto

On 8^th November 1973 more than 300 students at the University of New England in the regional NSW town of Armidale held a “Peasants’ Revolt” against exams:

students were in the role of peasants, there were lords and peasants…and professors would expropriate people’s work and use it in a very feudal way.[1]

Upon marching to the administrative building where they intended to make their case against exams, they found locked doors. Undeterred, and after a violent struggle, students occupied the administrative building for 24 hours.[2]

The University of New England was not alone in this – examinations were a focus of student movements across Australian universities. Melbourne University, with its culture of constructive participation as one form of student protest, formed an “SRC Exam Reform Group” and published articles entitled “Abolish Exams”.[3] They distributed protest stickers that students could put in their exam booklets:

I consider this exam to serve no educational purpose as all. I sit it under duress, because no creative alternative has been offered.[4]

Students at the Australian National University in Canberra were also unhappy about exams in 1973, having campaigned unsuccessfully for four years to reduce the quantity of assessment assigned to examination.[5] By 1973 some students were boycotting exams, which was portrayed as analogous to Vietnam War draft resistance, and they publicised an “Exam Resister’s Manifesto”.[6] By 1974 Australian National University students occupied university buildings to protest exams, as did students in the History Department at Flinders University in South Australia.[7]

“The examination”, according to Foucault, “opened up two correlative possibilities”:

Firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object…in order to maintain him in his individual features … under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge; and, secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measure of overall phenomena … the calculation of gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given ‘population’[8]

Through exams, students were either monitored for their individual achievement against a canon of knowledge, or they were measured against one another in order to rank and sort them. Examinations assert power and deny students ownership of the knowledge that is both the measure and the measured, of their success (or failure).

“Most students do not feel that they are able to control their own destiny”, read the Educational Policy of the Australian Union of Students, in which exams were described as “repressive” instruments.[9] In rejecting examination as a means of assessment, students seem to have felt that they also shed the shackles of an educational system that “indoctrinated” rather than “educated”.[10] Resisting exams was, for them, one means of claiming a knowledge that was their own and which in turn provided a sense of self-determination of both knowledge and life. At the University of New England, the importance of a sense of self-determination in relation to knowledge emerges in Rod Noble’s description of the Peasant’s Revolt occupation:

It was an incredible, creative time with people writing poetry. For the first time students had control of something that was ours. Actually it is incredible what creativity comes out of people when they’re in control of even a small part of their destiny.[11]

The anti-exam protests continued beyond the occupation in various ways, including treating the main exam centre carpet with foul-smelling chemicals so the room could not be used.[12] For the Classical Marxism II exam, students “in the true spirit of Marxism” drew their chairs together to complete the exam collaboratively. The exam supervisor, understandably, did not know what to do and fetched the Dean of the Arts Faculty, alerted the Vice-Chancellor and the Armidale police were called:

Three detectives and eight uniformed police with paddy wagons were ready. Interestingly, they were prepared to use the armed forces of the state to uphold the examination system.[13]

While not arrested, some students then spent the remainder of the exam period – around 3 weeks – dodging officials trying to serve them with injunctions while also supported increased student resistance against exams.

Especially sinister, according to students, was the perceived impact of exams on learning. Preparation for exams substitutes for learning in an exam-dominating educational system[14], screamed the student publications, determining the knowledge selected for learning and enhancing the power of those who select it:

Learning has developed into a one way traffic from powerful to powerless. Students have been conditioned all their lives to believe the god teachers and be good receivers of knowledge. Students’ self-confidence is constantly undermined by teachers until they reach the stage where they will not challenge the teachers.[15]

The Exam Resisters Collective at the Australian National University felt that abolishing exams would enable a “reinvigoration” of teaching and learning, by removing the driver that (falsely) determined what knowledge was. The hope of student movements against exams was that removal of exams as a teleological agent would enable more diverse and personal forms of assessment, under an assumption that knowledge is “actually” individual:

To speak of the calculation, quantification and measurement of one’s personal development or fulfilment is nonsense.[16]

Opposition to exams seems to have been associated with two other university reforms – increased student participation in university governance and student evaluation of teaching and courses. At the University of New England, banners displayed during the Peasants’ Revolt against exams, read:

Examine the Examiners.[17]

The Australian National University, Sydney University and Melbourne were all at this time establishing mechanisms for obtaining and providing student feedback on courses and teaching, which were informing embryonic policies on teaching quality.[18]

Evidence of the failure of exams to fulfil their role in the educating mission, was their negative impact on students, according to anti-exam activists. Higher stress levels were attached to a single exam as the only means of assessment, resulting in unfortunate suicides.[19] Moreover, students questioned the validity of exams as assessment of knowledge given the types of preparation for exams – examination only evaluated memorisation, they claimed. Assessment, it was increasingly felt, should support learning by individuals, rather than sorting and categorising them. It was hoped that, if any assessment was used at all (and only a minority felt that there should be none), then it would support individual empowerment rather than function as an instrument of power.[20]

Abolition of exams, increased flexibility in the curriculum, more student representatives in university governance and student choice in course selection were very regularly described as abolition of gods: God-professors, god-teachers, “God is an exam”, “Holy Marks” and teachers as “priests” speak to a rejection of the canon as official knowledge (as was the case with the proposal to remove the core in Philosophy at Sydney), rejection of hierarchical “ownership” and control of knowledge, and finally, rejection of single, across the board exams as appropriate measures of knowledge. Such rejection should be seen in a Nietzschean “God is dead” way – as the removal of singular, core organising principles and values for knowledge. It also reflects a rejection of knowledge as power, which, as educator Keith Hoskin pointed out “seems beyond reproach when it is underpinned by expertise”.[21] According to students’ new schema, knowledge, like the students who wrote poetry during their occupation of the University of New England administrative buildings, is creative, uncertain and does its best work when it is free.

By 1975 most universities had reviewed and expanded student participation in university government, reconstituted Professorial Boards to Academic Boards, which included junior staff and students and implemented rudimentary student evaluation schemes. For large bureaucracies, this is extraordinarily rapid change. In 1975, in response to the university environment nationally where examinations are losing favour as means of assessment, the new University of Sydney Academic Board received the Report of the Committee on Examinations and Assessment which articulated all the arguments and presented a set of guidelines in which students’ final degree results should be neither determined wholly by exams, nor wholly without them. The same year saw formalisation of student assessment of teachers. Ironically, by 1975 there were also reports made to the Academic Board about the difficulty of finding students who would spare the time to participate in the spaces now formalised for them in University government.[22]