Silent Night. Holy Night. Three Hundred Exams to Correct
Mulled wine for students. Handwriting trauma for professors.
Business schools do not close for Christmas. They simply rebrand suffering.
Students unwrap presents. Professors unwrap exams. And immediately start negotiating with their coffee about how much truth they’re emotionally ready to face.
This is the season of take-home exams. Two glorious weeks of squinting at handwriting from a generation that has not voluntarily held a pen since 2014, except to sign for delivery drivers. We call it assessment. It feels more like forensic analysis, minus the training and emotional support.
The irony is delicious. I teach strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship. Ambiguity. Judgment. Point of view. The ‘no right answer’ stuff. Then I ask students to sit alone, in silence, and pretend the real world comes with margins, word limits, and a single correct answer. I say this confidently, of course, while enforcing the exact margins and word limits myself.
Modern written exams were not invented to make people smarter. They were invented to sort people efficiently. Imperial China used them to select obedient administrators. Nineteenth-century Europe loved the idea and industrialized it. Bureaucracy needed filters, and exams were cheaper than thinking. And so, business schools inherited the ritual and never asked why. Ooops.
Correction is where the comedy peaks. You read the same idea three hundred times, each slightly worse than the last, until you start questioning your own syllabus. You want to give thoughtful feedback but no one reads it. You want to fail work that shows zero engagement, and you’re are gently reminded that “we don’t really fail here.”
And yet we persist. Because tradition. Because logistics. Because “we’ve always done it this way.”
Somewhere around exam number 147, you briefly wonder if this is how the Grinch got started. That’s when it becomes obvious; I’ve seen students reveal ten times more competence in business games, debates, simulations, and real projects with real stakes. Messy. Human. Uncomfortable. Exactly like work.
Enough said.
Yes, I still keep one written exam. One. Like fruitcake. Symbolic. Technically traditional but rarely enjoyed (though it does reassure my program director).
Yet I can’t stop thinking that the future of business education isn’t better exams. It’s fewer of them.
Merry Christmas!