Increased class sizes and a decrease in the number of teachers and teaching assistants has forced professor Robert Brym to replace essays, short answers, and any written work from his first-year sociology class, with multiple-choice tests and exams.
“Essays are critically important to an undergraduate education,” said Brym, whose experience in having to assign few essays is not uncommon. A recent survey released by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations claims that the no-essay trend is a provincial problem.
“Multiple-choice is really just asking you to retrieve empirical information. An essay requires you to have a thesis, a plan, and a clear line of thinking that pushes the intellectual boundaries of a student to think critically,” said confederation President Mark Langer.
The report surveyed 1,400 professors, of which one in three claim that classes have become so large they have been forced to push the essay aside and succumb to solely multiple-choice testing.
Associate Chair of the English Department Nick Mount has also noticed what he calls a gradual decline in essays. “It has gone down from the amount it was in the past, though, over a period of 40 to 50 years. Back when I was an undergraduate I had to write an essay every two weeks.
“As a faculty member, I would say: I want more essays, more TAs, and smaller classes,” said Mount, “But as associate chair, I know how finite the resources are, and I know how hard we are struggling to maintain our standards with the resources we have. It’s hard. There’s no two ways about it. I think so far, we are holding our own. If we dip much lower it’s going to be hard.”
Professor Mount has continued to assign three essays a year for his first year English courses. “I don’t really think a student learns how to think unless he or she is doing the thinking themselves.”
Brym has cut essays in SOC101 due to a lack of a labour pool to mark 1,400 essays, a reality brought on by university-funding decisions. “The money is not being squandered. Other courses are more expensive to teach. For example, science courses with labs use expensive equipment. However, the university has apparently decided to allocate very little money to [the course] Intro Sociology…. A colleague of mine at McMaster teaches an introductory sociology class the same size as U of T’s but she has 22 TA’s compared to my seven.”
“The increase in class size is not a force of nature,” explained Professor Brym. “It’s a result of provincial funding cuts and internal, administrative priorities, and decisions.”
Tutorials to Brym’s course have also been cut. “There are few tutorials — just seven this year, which is not enough…. Students used to attend a tutorial every week. That means they would have something like 20 tutorials a year. We’ve been cut to a third of the old rate. That being said, the cutback happened years ago.”
Mount acknowledges that there are ways to continue critical thinking in the classroom, but stresses that the essay is a crucial part of the education process. “Discussions and tutorials in class also help contribute to a student’s development to think critically.”
Langer adds that this critical thinking is central to the true role of universities. “We are not only churning out people to have careers…. We are also training people to think critically. In a democracy it is important to have an informed and critically thinking citizenry.”
Brym suggests that this shortcoming may be addressed through creative thinking from the university. “We could hire senior undergraduate students to work as TAs. Those who have done well in the first year course could be trained as teaching assistants and perhaps even receive a course credit for their labour.
“It really comes down to how much the administration is willing to invest in undergraduate education.”
