Use Your Imagination

Walking towards the Anthropology building on Friday morning, I glanced down at the blue book I had just purchased with which to take a language exam for my program. It was the first time in my graduate career that I had to use a blue book.  Looking at it, I was struck by the words “USE YOUR IMAGINATION” plastered above the bold “BLUE BOOK: EXAMINATION BOOK.”  The former phrase was placed in a box, and stood out from the rest of the administrative appearing text of the book: lines for name, subject, date, course number, etc.

 

“Use your imagination” it said.  It seemed so odd, on the front of a blue book, to be called to imagine.  Exams seem precisely not the site for imagination. Exams are the moment when knowledge is being evaluated, not creativity.  While of course there can be some creative labor in the way in which materials are connected or in the structure of an argument, in an exam, there is a rubric for evaluation, and you are invited not to imagine what the answer is, but to answer the question according to previously established guidelines, whether that be by solving an equation, identifying a passage, or comparing two images. 

 

The demand for imagination seemed not only out of place, but even a little offensive.  While I am deeply invested in the creative work that academic labor requires and engenders, I also recognize that the structure of the exam is not one that cultivates imagination or creativity.  The exam, including the convention of blue books, is an archaic form that perpetuates rigid ideas of what constitutes knowledge. Even the exams that I will take at the end of this year, in which there will be no blue books, are not about using my imagination, but about demonstrating a particular grasp over a canon of material.  Granted, I am in a program that allows me to define and redefine what that body of material is, but the point remains, that I will be required to exhibit knowledge about the texts, theories, and techniques that are on my lists. 

 

The call to imagine masks the truth of the exam, pretending as though the blue book is a conduit for imagination and play, rather than a hierarchical tool for the regurgitation of learned materials.  Exams have their place, their gate keeping function can be critiqued, but the evaluation serves a function as a manifestation of competence.  However, it remains a structure of exclusivity, authority, regulation, and domination.  Pretending as though the exam is the locus of creative work with the exhortation to be imaginative not only cheapens creative labor, but masks and denies the disciplining function of the exam. 

 

The irony, though, is that I was taking a translation exam, and, as I struggled with vocabulary and grammatical structures with which I was not familiar, a little imagination was useful.  If only I had written the passage as I imagined it to be, rather than the mangled version I coughed up, perhaps it would have been more successful.