summer, examination, and discipline

Watermelons are ripe but the summer semester of my university has quietly come to an end. 

My colleagues are marking students' term papers or waiting for late submission since last week. 

Writing a term paper is painstaking while some students prefer a one-off examination.

Although examination is not a norm in my department, writing a term paper is not entirely different from it.

It makes me recall Foucault's insights, in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, about examination:

"The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth."

Like the museum in many ways, as argued by Terry Eagleton, the examination sets rules and regulations to discipline, normalize, and classify candidates. Power plays between the assessor and the assessed. The ritual symbolizes an exchange of knowledge, effort and grades. Foucault says:

"The examination enabled the teacher, while transmitting his knowledge, to transform his pupils into a whole field of knowledge... the examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher."

In the process of exchange, pupils are to be disciplined and normalized to receive good grades in the examination whereas markers give As to those who demonstrates a high degree of discipline and normalization. Similarly teachers graded pupils according to a set of rules and regulations pre-approved by the institution. Grade distribution is highly regulated and respected in order to promote success and punish failure. In other words, the exchange of knowledge in the form of examination reduces the roles of teachers and pupils into self-discipline and self-normalization.