Two Broads Abroad | Exams highlight contrasting aspects of Italian and American university systems

Acacia O'Connor Columnist

Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I am not really the nervous type. I tend to take things as they come with an easy spirit and ready confidence. Contrast this, however, with the Acacia on the morning of Tuesday, April 3, nearly shaking as she flipped through her extensive notes for the hundredth time.

My Junior Year Abroad program in Bologna, an Eastern College Consortium Program run cooperatively by Vassar-Wellesley-Wesleyan, offers five courses each semester for students to take. Besides these courses, students are also encouraged to take classes at the Università di Bologna, alongside Italian students. My università course, a literature class on the Italian Romantic Period, concluded this week with an exam. The exam was terrifying, but also one of the most rewarding academic experiences I have ever had. It has given me an opportunity to reflect on the Italian University system and the value of studying a second language in a foreign academic setting.

I was the 40th person in line to take the exam, which began at 9 a.m. One after another, classmates were called into the professor’s office to take the exam. Fifteen to 20 minutes later they would re-emerge, mostly relieved and happy. After almost three hours of waiting, I was called in.

In the office were four desks. At each desk was either my professor or one of his assistants, each giving an exam. I sat down across from one of the assistants and she asked me about my program. She notified the professor that she had an “Erasmus”—students who travel between countries on exchanges and such are called Erasmus students in Europe. She asked me my first question, which was a very basic inquiry about one of the major texts. Feeling nauseated, I waited for the Italian words to file neatly in my brain so that I could pronounce them. I waited. And waited.

“Aspetta un attimo (Wait a moment),” I asked the woman and took a deep breath. Embarrassingly poor phrases began to pour out of my mouth, eventually followed by easier thoughts until finally I found my footing. I relaxed, finished my exam and received my grade.

Almost everything about the final exam in a European university is strangely foreign. After a month and a half of classes, the course was mostly completed. I had roughly three weeks to prepare for the final exam, upon which my entire grade depended. In some cases, however, you may wait two months or more between the end of classes and the exam date.

The exam was oral, as is typical, and obviously in Italian. You are expected to take down every word the professor has said in the 35 hours of class time and memorize it, alongside reading the texts assigned for the course. The Italian university stands in stark contrast to the creative and intuitive style of a liberal arts education at a college such as Vassar: Regurgitation and recitation count on these exams, not ingenuity and analysis.

While initially this rigid educational system seems repugnant to our refined free-thinking ways, I learned as much, if not more, in the Università course than I have in any course I have ever taken at the college level. True, I did not do any critical analysis of my own. I was instead obliged to know the texts and how they had been interpreted by several critics inside and out. There was no room for bullshitting, if I wanted to excel.

That said, it is also important to reflect on where I am coming from as a foreign student. This system of oral accountability for scripted information worked well for me. But this is certainly in part because in order to understand the texts themselves, all written in 17th century Italian, I had to read and re-read. I had to apply myself twice as hard to understand at all, much less well. A narrowed interpretation was all I was prepared to imbibe, considering my level of language skill. Meanwhile, I’m not sure that a system such as this serves Italian students as much. They learn what the professor tells them and nothing more. Considering the depth and richness of the texts (for example, I Promessi Sposi, one of the greatest Italian novels of all-time and 700 pages long), this method seems superficial and banal.

I’m not about to turn patriotic and rave about the primacy of the American educational system at the university level, but I do feel that the liberal arts system is more about the individual, his or her thoughts and interaction with the subjects. Europeans go into a field of specialization with an end goal in mind—whatever that career aim may be. Where schools such as Vassar value education for education’s sake, and the future is slightly farther off, big European universities educate students for their immediate futures. They learn what is “necessary” according to the educators and administrators in charge.

There are thousands of other minute details and differences between the two school systems, none of which raise one substantially above the other. These differences have helped me to reconsider how best to learn and why I’m learning—a reflection that may only be possible with distance and Romantic literature questions in a foreign language.