With a month of the semester behind us, exams have begun in rapid succession, testing not only course content but also motivation.
Exams are an endless source of extrinsic motivation and pressure. The drive for grades, for beating the curve and for possessing an appealing transcript prompts late-night cramming and coffee-driven chaos.
It’s difficult to find inherent interest in the act of taking an exam, of frantically scribbling down answers and scrawling illegible essays. Half of the time when I leave an exam, I can’t fully remember what I just filled my sixteen blue-book pages with.
The motivation that comes from exam success is purely instrumental, as grades correlate with abstract visions of future success. The need for exams, of course, stems from the desire to quantitatively evaluate learning and to provide concrete measures of progress.
After all, productivity drives society, and we assign value according to tangible achievements. Bullet points on a résumé denote prized aspects of our identities intended to earn each of us a particular position in productive society.
To quote W.H. Auden’s often-cited verse, “Poetry makes nothing happen; it survives / in the valley of its making, where executives/ would never want to tamper.”
Auden’s words pit the intrinsic value of poetry against the instrumental demands of modern society, representing it as a form of production isolated from goal-oriented processes and “executive” concerns.
We can’t live in a world entirely of poetry, art or other idealistic interests, and we can’t detach ourselves from productive society.
Our motivations are always mixed, a blend of individual interests and practical considerations.
The ideal is to unearth the connection between what we intrinsically value and what we mechanically set down on a résumé.
If the subjects we study in classes are of inherent interest, then studying for an exam theoretically should not be a chore. The problem is that extrinsic motivation can reduce and gradually deplete our intrinsic motivation.
An often-replicated 1971 study by Edward Deci evaluated two groups of people asked to perform a puzzle-making task. One group was offered a monetary reward for completing the task; the other group was offered no incentive.
The group that was promised payment initially showed more motivation to perform and master the task. However, once the incentive was no longer offered, their interest declined, while the unpaid group continued to demonstrate interest in the puzzles.
The moral of the story — if a psychology experiment can have a moral — is that in the long run we’re better off without external measures of success.
As Auden amends later in his stanza, poetry is “a way of happening.” It has the ability to comprehend the inner-workings of the world and to imagine alternatives — without altering external existence, producing quantifiable products or meeting executive demands.
Amidst exams and résumé revisions, the best we can do is to find “a way of happening” that allows our intrinsic interests to align with our extrinsic goals, and to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of mixed motivations.
In other words, find some personal version of poetic inspiration, but don’t write your exams in verse.
kmilvert@umail.iu.edu
