A letter recently published in the Independent has revealed an apparent rift between members of the English Department over what its author claims are grammatically incorrect and ambiguous MA exam questions.
According to professor Harry White, a tenured faculty member with the English Department, part of the department’s MA exam administered to graduate students has, at times, been incomprehensible.
The English MA exam consists of three sections. It is written and edited collectively by the English Department faculty and later finalized by a committee of eight, four of which are elected by the department. One of the sections of the exam, the critical theory portion, is the section that White said is the most confusing.
Yet professor Kristen Over said that White’s claims are based on a disagreement of ideas between White and other members of the English Department and that there are no problems within the department.
“We have one member of senior faculty who has been here for I think 33 years who has a gripe, his own gripe with the department,” said Over. “The department doesn’t agree with him and he is now making that public.
“He has presented to the department his ideas about the MA exam over a fairly long period of time and he hasn’t gotten, I guess, satisfaction from the department, so he decided to take it to students in the form of a letter to the Independent,” she said.
But White said that he went to the Independent after exhausting all his possibilities, including going to the administration.
White said the critical theory section, which was introduced over a decade ago as a requirement on the MA exam, has received complaints from graduate students about its coherency.
“The introduction of that particular section of the exam as a requirement goes back to ’89 or shortly there after. Prior to that, and I’ve been on the graduate faculty, we never received any kind of complaints from students about the exam,” said White.
White and some English Department personnel collected data showing there were significant differences in the fail rate over a ten-year period between the critical theory and other sections of the MA exam.
White said the disproportionate flunk out rate is evidence of problems with the exam and that his colleagues refuse to address them.
“All I asked for originally and all I’ve ever been asking for is to recognize that there is a problem and to evaluate it. And every attempt I’ve made to bring that forth has been ignored” said White.
According to minutes from a department meeting in September of 2006, White presented a motion that would require all MA exam questions to be “…clear, precise, to the point, and readily understandable.”
The motion passed by a 2-1 vote, with five people choosing to abstain. White said he sees that as a problem.
“The graduate program coordinator, voted against the motion,” said White. “The rest of the Department abstained. In other words, the majority of people in the English Department would not support a motion that their exams be grammatical and understandable,” he said. But according to professor Bradley Greenburg, the English Department has been trying to improve the process of putting together the MA exam.
“It is something that we have tried to talk about and make better over this period of time too,” said Greenburg. “It’s not something that we think is perfect but is something we have tried to constructively make better all the time,” he said.
Members of the English Department disagree with White’s approach and have responded to White’s allegations in their own letter to the Independent. They reiterated their feelings in a recent interview with the paper.
“We regret his decision to publish this in the paper because it is not the intent of the Department to focus on these matters,” said professor Vicki Byard. “All of us are doing the best that we can to work with our students, and that is what we want our attention focused on instead of having these types of arguments,” she said.
White’s accusations have caused much controversy. His letter to the Independent has stirred the emotions of current students and former graduates of NEIU’s English program. Many students seem to be split on how they feel about the accusations put forth by White.
The University reacted by submitting a letter, which reprimanded his actions. The letter from Dean Kate Forhan called White’s letter an apparent attack on the professionalism and integrity of the English Department’s degree programs. It went on to caution him about what Dean Forhan called accusations of fraud that were leveled against the department.
White said that he plans to speak with one other member of the administration to get his complaints addressed.