A lot of my friends have either expressed extreme reservations towards online examinations or supported vehemently the decrease in word limit that CHRIST University has introduced. While largely valid both arguments are rather short sighted. Read this thread.
Online exams in themselves are rather liberating. They remove such confounding variables as handwriting and "neatness" which is often extremely discriminatory. They introduce a uniformity of handwriting so that the content of the answer and not how it looks becomes important
At the same time, they have a problem of access and connectivity, but in Universities like CHRIST, where the vast majority of students are privileged and rich (it does not have reservations, remember), this problem can be accounted for. In these times, there arent many options
but the problem is how the university is looking at the exam. They intend to transpose the same Q and A format of traditional exams to an online platform, which is problematic.
Online exams have allowed universities across India the chance to move away from memory based regurgitate rewarding written exams towards more critical application based assessment methods, through assignments.
These take away the factor of cheating and malpractice for you cant really cheat on a critical essay or a project, since there are also plagiarism checks. This is more inclusive also of those who cannot cram information but can refer to it and critically engage with it
By also taking away a time restriction of two hours, they even solve the connectivity issue, for one needs the internet only to submit the assignment, which can be arranged more easily than two hours of uninterrupted supply
They also solve the issue of typing or writing fast, where slow writers or slow thinkers that require a longer time to arrange their thoughts are disadvantaged in traditional time bound written exams
But somehow, CHRIST has found a way to make online exams a liability by retaining the Q and A format with 2 hour uninterrupted webcam monitoring and has reduced word limits for 650 to 300 words.
some of my friends have celebrated this reduction by saying it will make our answers more crisp. But in humanities and social sciences, precision is not measured by brevity but by clarity of argument. Unlike science or commerce, humanities dont deal with objective "pointers"
This is especially true of literature where most answers are argument based, where one has to write an essay trying to make a point and justifying it. A smaller word limit forces one to make a faulty argument that is never really valid
much like twitter infact, where arguments are judged by how sexy they sound and not by their validity. TO make a clear case, one needs an essay, not a tweet or an inshorts byte. You cannot be merely concise with your argument, without addressing all its repercussions
I can be concise and say that, for instance, eating meat is wrong because animals are treated badly. But that argument is not bad, because we treat animals badly also when we kill rats or keep them in zoos. SO why is eating meat wrong?
Some people might be comfortable with making bad, sweeping arguments that can be very concise because they are extremely short sighted. But I am not, and it is unfair to rewards concise sophistry over longer, but more valid argumentation.
In subjects like Psychology, this word limit is less of a problem, for there are more "objective pointers" but even there, in case studies, multiple different factors can be recognized, which require one a space to elucidate.
If you are rewarding reductionist case study answers, you are training aspiring psychologists to not look for complexity of causal factors, because irl nothing is as simple or as straightforward as to be expressed in 300 words
and if the point of the exams is merely to test your knowledge and not whether you can apply it irl, then education is nothing but a luxury product which can only be afforded by pedantic and privileged idiots that will never learn to deal with critical or complex thought
