The following links provide examples of student performance on in-class examinations. The quality of these exams varies, but I selected these examples to illustrate points that came up in the course surveys in the fall of 1999. The course surveys highlighted for the need to clarify and to enhance the course's interdisciplinary structure. The fall 1999 midterm exams basically required students to demonstrate mastery of a particular module or modules within an overall unit. For example the first midterm required students to discuss the aesthetic of functionalism through reference to particular Houses of Prayer or Paleolithic cave art. Each of the modules in this unit integrated various disciplinary resources. For example, in the unit on cathedrals, student employed concepts from numerology, theology, color theory, and other disciplines to explicate the function cathedrals. The exam questions on these modules required synthesis and application of diverse disciplinary resources, but most of the modules in the unit on functionalism more closely approximated cross-disciplinary work than interdisciplinary work. Further, after reflecting on the results of the fall 1999, I felt that the exams were prompting "regurgitation" of the approach to the material in particular modules as seen in the online chapters or the class handouts; in other words, they were promting student to demonstrate mastery of a particular modules or set of closely related modules more than they were requiring synthesis of a wide array of disciplinary materials across modules.
After fall 1999, I made an effort to restructure the midterm exams to reflect not only the enhanced interdisciplinarity of the course (see the enactment section for further discussion) but also to require more higher-level synthesis. I also redesigned the first exam, in particular, to require more application of concepts to diverse contexts.
The final exam in the fall 1999 was, I felt, still a very good exam which required synthesis of the entire course. The exam question was the question we began with on the first day of class, and on the last day, students wrote their response to "What is Art?" based on 15 weeks of materials. Although I got some good responses, it seemed to me that students were discussing each aesthetic school in serial fashion and giving examples of them through various disciplines. Interdisciplinarians have hotly debated exactly what integration should look like and by what criteria we could call something interdisciplinary (see the design section for further discussion). In the fall 1999 final, students were clearly bringing a number of disciplinary perspectives and aesthetic schools of thought to bear upon a central question. However, it struck me that in most cases, students were not integrating the materials to form a new conception of what art was that transcended each of the separate aesthetic frameworks; they were integrating materials only to the extent of discussing each aesthetic school in the same essay. In part, I now believe this was due partly to my own approach in classroom discussions and to the structure of the exam question, which directed students to discuss the four broad aesthetic schools of the course.
Comparison of the exam questions and student responses from 1999 to those in later terms, especially the spring and Maymester 2001 reveals the tremendous changes in the interdisciplinary approach of the course; these changes also reflect tremendous growth in my own approach to interdisciplinarity. The course as I am teaching it in the Maymester of 2001 is a radically different kind of course from the course I taught in the fall 1999. While in the fall 1999, I asked students to comment on the use of color in the illuminations of Hildegard, by the spring 2001 I was asking students to discuss the concept of color through resources in the visual and musical arts. While in the fall 1999 I asked students to discuss a specific house of prayer as a representative of functionalism, in the spring 2001 I required students to discuss the aesthetic of functionalism as a satisfactory response to "What is Art?" using the resources from multiple units. In the Maymester 2001, I further refined the first unit by incorporating modules on theater and music; responses to this question required not merely cross-disciplinary synthesis but a fully interdisciplinary analysis.
Fall 1999 exams and selected student responses
Midterm exam I and responses of student 17 | student 18 | student 31 | student 8 | student 21
Final Exam and responses of student 11 | student 14 | student 24 | student 18 | student 25 | student 29 | student 6
Spring 2000 exams and selected student responses
Midterm exam I and responses of student 17 | student 5 | student 6
Self-Portrait Written Projects Spring 2000 (final exams)
Fall 2000 exams and selected student responses
Midterm exam I respones of student 13| student 14| student 22| student 2
Midterm exam II and responses of student 26 | student 22 | student 6
Self-Portrait Written Projects Fall 2000 (final exams)
Spring 2001 exams and selected student responses
Sample Student responses: student 13 | student 22 | student 6 | student 12 | student 4
Midterm Exam II
Maymester 2001 exams and selected student responses