The singular news case brings to light the dual nature of the student-ircocervo, roughly half person and half performance. And it also suggests the little value that the iconic exam has now taken on over time
How do you evaluate a student who is silent? I believe this is, in short, the paradoxical and scandalous question that has been asked the examiners of the Foscarini classical high school in Venice, where three students deliberately did not utter a word despite appearing for the final exams. After all, they had enough credits to pass the exam and it seems they had already passed the university entrance exams. It matters little that it was a sort of work-to-rule against the scores, in their opinion too low, given to the second test by the external member of Greco; instead I believe that the controversy over the version is just an accident of history to make us hit our noses against a fundamental question on the meaning of school. A student, when he has to be evaluated, is never just a person nor just a performance.. If only the person were evaluated, any test or questioning would be useless, and we would only rely on the previous attention at the desks and the consistency in studying. If only the performance were evaluated, having committed oneself for years every morning and every afternoon would be worth nothing compared to the occasional migraine or the imponderable fainting.
How do you evaluate a student who is silent? I believe this is, in short, the paradoxical and scandalous question that has been asked the examiners of the Foscarini classical high school in Venice, where three students deliberately did not utter a word despite appearing for the final exams. After all, they had enough credits to pass the exam and it seems they had already passed the university entrance exams. It matters little that it was a sort of work-to-rule against the scores, in their opinion too low, given to the second test by the external member of Greco; instead I believe that the controversy over the version is just an accident of history to make us hit our noses against a fundamental question on the meaning of school. A student, when he has to be evaluated, is never just a person nor just a performance.. If only the person were evaluated, any test or questioning would be useless, and we would only rely on the previous attention at the desks and the consistency in studying. If only the performance were evaluated, having committed oneself for years every morning and every afternoon would be worth nothing compared to the occasional migraine or the imponderable fainting.
Relying on evaluation grids that sometimes border on the ridiculous, with indicators and descriptors that look with one eye at celestial teaching and with the other at the risk that some emotional parent will resort to lawyers, teachers try to navigate between these two extremes, at least until to maturity. However, it is there that, an easy metaphor, the donkey falls: the state exams hold up the cornucopia of position income with one hand, guaranteeing forty points based on the credits accrued in the previous three years; with the other they deal blows, entrusting the remaining sixty points to the opinion of a commission which, in the majority, knows the student only through two writings and an interview. In the frantic days of maturity it appears clear the dual nature of the student-ircocervo, roughly half person and half performance. The three Venetian girls, whom everyone describes as studious, are certainly also intelligent: they have grasped the gap between these two identities, they have recognized the unconfessed incongruity and, more or less instinctively, they have put the commission against the wall. Deciding to remain silent during the oral exam is equivalent to saying: we are these, and if you evaluate us as people we have already accumulated enough points to pass the exam with a minimum of 60, so the performance is useless; if instead you believe that everything depends on the performance, have the courage to write down that what we have laboriously built in three years of study counts for nothing. I would not like to be a commissioner in that exam (I would never want to be one, to tell the truth), because the teachers will in fact be called upon to decide whether the ministerial vulgate is right, according to which the final exam is the fundamental step in the life of every student, or the mutiny risked by the three girls, to remove the veil of hypocrisy and demonstrate that the final exam, as it is, is useless.
