Marcus Webb had been a sociology teacher for 19 years before he made the call that even he didn’t expect. He decided to cancel the midterm in the middle of the fall semester, when he looked at a stack of half-finished lecture notes and thought back to the blank looks on the faces of the students in his previous class. Not put it off. Do not do it. He gave his students something they had never seen in a college building instead: trading cards for theories.
At first glance, the idea seemed easy. Each student was given a blank card template and told to write about one major sociological theorist. The theorists included Durkheim, Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci, and a few others that depended on the seminar. They had to fit that theorist’s main ideas, important texts, historical background, and relevance to the real world onto a single card. Both sides. The next class, they traded cards, talked about them, and asked each other questions. Eventually, they put together a deck that the whole group could use for the rest of the semester.
Depending on your point of view, it sounds either inspired or a little silly. Some of Webb’s coworkers looked at him funny when he told them about it in the faculty lounge. One of them asked him if he was worried about rigor, and it seemed like they really meant it. It turned out that he wasn’t.
By the end of that semester, Webb had gotten the best student evaluation scores of his career. He later said that it was almost embarrassing to talk about this because evaluation scores were never really what he was after. What really amazed him was how good the final papers were. Students were correctly citing theorists and making connections between frameworks in a way that his previous classes had not done very often. A junior student who had been mostly quiet for the first four weeks wrote a final paper that was so good that the person who graded it said it was the best undergraduate essay she had seen that year.
Something good can be found in what Webb found by accident. In school, grading has always been a touchy subject. Research consistently shows that grades given by teachers are not just objective snapshots of what a student knows. They are affected by the subject, the way the classroom works, the student’s personality, and sometimes the subtle, hard-to-articulate sense that a teacher develops over time. The goal of external exams is to get rid of that, making the measurement more consistent. However, there will always be a difference between the two measures, even in systems where internal grades and external assessments are required by law to measure the same things. An example of this is Norway’s national curriculum structure. It doesn’t matter how well the scaffolding is built; assessment is hard work.
This is what Webb changed about the test so that it measured the thing that he cared about, even though he might not have thought of it that way. Not remember under stress. Not being able to finish an exam booklet in 90 minutes. Something more like real conceptual fluency, the kind that students get when they teach and argue with each other and have to turn abstract ideas into real things. The format of trading cards forced compression, and clarity is forced by compression.
It’s possible that some of the great reviews were due to the fact that the product was new. Students like professors who are willing to take risks and who seem to be thinking about how students learn instead of just going through the motions. Being given the chance to do something out of the ordinary—like summing up Foucault on an index card and defending it to a classmate—seems to change the social climate of a classroom in ways that are hard to measure but very clear.
Webb hasn’t given up on traditional tests completely. Reading responses, a big final paper, and being responsible are still there. The midterm hasn’t come back, though. He’s given the trading card assignment three times now, and each time, something that didn’t happen on his other tests happened: students remembered what they had made weeks after the semester was over.
