yesterday someone asked marge garber about the history of the general exams at harvard. so: we used to have a very long list of books you should have read, covering all the fields and very thoroughly so. at the end of two years, you go to an exam in which five professors, each representing a different period, would in turn examine you on their period. this meant you had to know every period thoroughly; on the other hand, you didn't read set texts. it is assumed that your knowledge of particular texts is selective. you might be asked, now, which dickens novel would you like to talk about? and then the exam takes off from there.

in the 80s, harvard decided to adopt the u penn approach, which was to have a set list of books on which the candidate would be examined. half of those books would be set texts that all students would have to read, and the candidate supplies the rest of the list. now penn's list is only 50 books. when harvard adopted this idea they increased the length of the list three-fold, and the student selection component dropped out. so we have really ended up with the worst of both systems. the list is long, too long even for a fast reader to speedread in a summer and hope to retain any more than broad themes, and yet, because the texts rather than area have been defined, the questioning is gruelling and nitpicky and assumes thorough knowledge. you don't even have time to read the introduction, and what kind of studying is that?!

when you look at other harvard departments, take complit, they've a list half the size of ours, they have two years of coursework before they take it, they know who their examiners are ahead of time and spend the summer before consulting and building up rapport, and it is a written exam. no one ever fails. interestingly enough, penn has long abandonned their list, whereas harvard has kept the list and moved the exam forward by two semesters - mind you, we're only the second year to take it this early - and the faculty is divided on this change. i think they will have to move it back eventually - this isn't working. i also hear that the junior faculty are not in favour of the list - they're specialising faster these days, and they aren't comfortable examining outside of their own fields. it will only be a matter of time before this cross-panel examination will become less effective. it's really rather sad. either the old harvard style or the old penn style would have been appropriate and meaningful - i quite like this wide-ranging examination system actually - but surely the graduate steering committee has to see that the length is absurd. you can have one or the other, not both. a few of

us, talking about the exam, think it's a waste of time for us too - you cram for a whole summer and make yourself unhappy, you don't have time to really study any of the texts, you retain nothing, and it contributes nothing to your development. i could have spent the summer reading criticism of my own choosing and working on languages and come back more prepared and full of ideas. instead we start the year exhausted, and never had a chance to recover from the last semester.