An examination format rigid enough to be graded consistently comes to be mastered for its own sake, and crowds out the thinking the examination was meant to find.
The eight-legged essay was the required form of answer in the Ming and Qing civil service examinations from the late fifteenth century: an exposition of a Confucian text in eight fixed sections with prescribed parallel phrasing. It made the grading of enormous numbers of candidates tractable and comparable, and it was learned as a template. The seventeenth-century scholar Gu Yanwu judged its damage greater than the burning of the books; it was abolished in 1901.
In practice
- An exam board's mark scheme rewards a fixed essay structure so reliably that schools teach the structure, and the arguments inside it become interchangeable.
- A student who has learned the five-paragraph essay writes one in response to every prompt, including a request for a letter.
- Standing
- Defenders then and since point to what it solved: grading hundreds of thousands of candidates on a common standard. Its rigidity was the price of the examination's fairness. Compare Campbell's law.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for