My sophomore year in college, I declared a major in government and a prospective minor in history. At Wesleyan, it is both required and common for 300-level government classes to be seminar-style. I have never been inclined, nor particularly good at, participating in debates or class discussions, so being in a class where a majority of my grade was contingent on participation worried me.
At first, I got away with not participating in class discussions. I silently soaked in what other students were talking about and the general class discourse until the Professor announced we would be participating in an oral exam. What this promoted wasn’t just a one-dimensional knowledge of the content, but the ability for students to actively recall information talked about in class or in readings and then apply that logic to a discussion. This type of exam wasn’t something I was familiar with or good at. Worriedly, I began to extensively practice debating my friends and roommates about general topics while concurrently studying the material and coming up with hypothetical arguments in my head. Going into the first oral exam, as expected, I ended up doing just okay, not being able to contest some of the Professor’s arguments and forgetting some material.
In retrospect, I realised that my grade on the oral exam wasn’t a reflection of my lack of knowledge on the actual material, just my inexperience and anxiety when in a real-time debate. To combat this issue for the remainder of the semester, after every class, I would pick a topic assigned in the readings, and I would talk to the professor about it for as long as she would allow. This made me slowly comfortable talking about these issues one-on-one, and eventually, when the final oral exam day came, I ended up acing it.
