Are there currently people with the skills to pass such tests, or is this proposal intended to give students a novel skill that the instructors lack?
It’s been my vague impression that there are no widely-accepted models of how history works that are detailed enough to let you predict the outcomes of unfamiliar historical events, and that in the few cases where students are asked to give causal explanations in current classes, their work is graded as a persuasive essay rather than as a factual claim that can be held to some objective standard of correctness.
I intended the latter. Ideally, instructors would start teaching students that in an act of educational reform, but that’s harder and very unlikely from what I see now.
there are no widely-accepted models of how history works that are detailed enough to let you predict the outcomes of unfamiliar historical events
We don’t need such a model. The students would be figuring it out for themselves, and we don’t expect them to predict in great detail. There’d have to be a lot of partial credit in this.
in the few cases where students are asked to give causal explanations in current classes, their work is graded as a persuasive essay rather than as a factual claim that can be held to some objective standard of correctness.
And presumably we’d accept conditionals like “unclear if the emperor does X, but if so the eunuchs start a coup in the next year and the widows support it, unless...”
Are there currently people with the skills to pass such tests, or is this proposal intended to give students a novel skill that the instructors lack?
It’s been my vague impression that there are no widely-accepted models of how history works that are detailed enough to let you predict the outcomes of unfamiliar historical events, and that in the few cases where students are asked to give causal explanations in current classes, their work is graded as a persuasive essay rather than as a factual claim that can be held to some objective standard of correctness.
I intended the latter. Ideally, instructors would start teaching students that in an act of educational reform, but that’s harder and very unlikely from what I see now.
We don’t need such a model. The students would be figuring it out for themselves, and we don’t expect them to predict in great detail. There’d have to be a lot of partial credit in this.
That’s exactly the issue.
And presumably we’d accept conditionals like “unclear if the emperor does X, but if so the eunuchs start a coup in the next year and the widows support it, unless...”