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Assessment objective v: Show an ability to produce informed, independent opinions and judgments.

Assessment objective iv invited you to think for yourself and consider the views of others. In a sense this new objective follows on from that. The emphasis on "opinions and judgments" is clear enough. The key words here, however, are "informed" and "independent".

Ai) 'Informed' opinions and judgments. On a very basic level an 'uninformed' opinion (the opposite of 'informed') is one that is made without the knowledge or information necessary for the judgment to be well-founded. One of the skills, then, that you will have to develop as an 'A' level student is to base your judgments on knowledge, evidence and information. To simply 'blurt out' your feelings (in class or on paper) can be fun (!) but to make an informed judgment is something very different: it is the latter that makes you a student of literature and not just a casual reader. In a sense you are being asked to see that the understanding of a text is a complex process. Consider 'Tess' again. You will already have realised from reading about Assessment Objective iii that a knowledge of the historical and personal background to a text and author furthers understanding. A student who knows about the religious background to the text, who knows something about Darwin, the class structure of the time, Romanticism and the concept of tragedy will be at a serious advantage to other readers. S/he will be able to write in an 'informed' way about the text while the reader who is ignorant of these things will produce 'ignorant' judgments. If you don't know about the influence of Romanticism (or simply don't know about Romanticism) then you cannot talk or write about the text in an 'uninformed' way. If you haven't read up on tragedy then you cannot know what Hardy has done with the genre, how he changed it and how original his contribution to literature was. If you don't know something about his life you may also miss some aspects of the text as a document that reflects the author's life experiences and circumstances. (These circumstances can sometimes help us to come to secure conclusions about how we should interpret or 'see' a character, event or action).

Aii) A part of being informed will also be the extent to which you have read other texts by the author you are studying and other texts from the same period or genre. Of course, you will not be assessed on any other texts you read nor can you use them extensively in examinations. However, this broader background base to your study of a particular text does help to 'orientate' your judgment, see patterns in an authors' work or in the literature of a particular period. There are even instances when texts demand that you read other texts. In 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles', for instance, there is a reference to Walt Whitman (an American 'Transcendentalist' poet - an American Romantic). By reading some Whitman you learn about the author's reading matter and about the influences on his work. The character Angel can also be better understood if you read some of the literature he is purportedly reading - it helps define his character. In fact, writers like Hardy expect their readers to be well read if they are to develop a full appreciation of their work. To understand Hardy well you need, for instance, to be well schooled in Darwin, have a background knowledge of genetics (Mendeleev), have a good grounding in theology (traditional and modern) and have a very good vocabulary! This is all part of being 'informed'. It is also why teachers encourage all students to do 'background reading'. It is necessary and invaluable.

In a sense, 'informed' refers to to the text itself, then. And at the level of the text itself there is a great deal to be done if you are to be a good student of literature and a confident examinee:

a) Vocabulary. All writers use the vocabulary of the period they lived. As a result they can often use language that is unfamiliar to readers or language that has subtly changed its meaning. Students studying Chaucer (13th century) or Shakespeare (17th century) will notice this in particular. The same is the case for most authors, however, and Hardy is no exception any more than Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or more modern writers such as James Joyce or T. S. Eliot are. So, be methodical: use a good dictionary and find out what the words mean. Weaker or unmethodical students DO NO DO THIS! They read and hope that their ignorance will not catch them out. This is being 'uninformed' and you are not meeting the criteria for the examination. By the way, learning lots of words is good for your brain. It is food and your brain works better for it. Suck it and see.

b) When making judgments about characters and events within the text the decisions you make should be 'informed'. You should be able to cross-reference you thoughts across the whole novel in order to build a broadly-based picture of a character or situation. In 'Tess' if you decide that Angel Clare's parents are entirely to blame for the character of their son Angel and his prejudices about how women should be virginal, educated and of a certain class, you could be forgetting that the Clare's live in a society in which most people held similar views as members of a particular class and that it might be unfair, or 'unhistorical', to be too hard on them. Considering the text as a whole you might notice, too, that Hardy himself is not too hard on them himself, recognising as he does at various points in the novel their weaknesses AND their qualities. An 'informed' statement about a character will be made with a sense of the character as a whole in mind and, therefore, with the whole text in mind.

TASK: collect information about the Clare parents that show them in a variety of lights.

Aiv) Being 'informed' also means writing with understanding and with a sense of what is appropriate. To call Alec in 'Tess' a 'fascist' could mean that you detest him, that he is an authoritarian figure, that he is brutal and unbending, and you may be happy with this description. However, an 'informed' student will know that fascism is a twentieth century political movement and although the word is now used as a metaphor for brutality and insensitivity it is inappropriate to apply twentieth century concepts to the writing of another period. The same can be argued for the use of terms like 'male chauvinist pig'. Apart from the colloquial nature of the phrase, we need as readers to keep in mind that we live in a much more self-conscious society today in respect of women's rights. Our society has lived through two major feminist movements this century (the early decades of the century and the 50s and 60s) and as a result we tend to apply the concepts of the age we live in, sometimes inappropriately to other ages. In fact, a close reading of the character of Alec can result in his being seen as an embodiment of nature's instinctive desires - of Nature's brutality rather than his own as such. It is, then, too easy to write in an uninformed way, presuming that OUR values are the values by which all texts should be judged.

B) "Independent judgements". In a sense, this is clear enough. You are expected to develop independence of judgement. Yes, you are expected to read and absorb the ideas of others, but you are also expected to assess them, judge them and then come up with your own view. It will thus be an 'informed' view but not PLAGIARISM. Now, plagiarism is one of the great sins in literary study. It is regarded as a form of cheating. It tends to happen when you read somethng about a text that you think is really really correct, so you end up writing it in an essay as if the idea is your own thought. After all ,if an idea is correct and someone just got to it before you did, why shouldn't you use it too? Noone OWNS ideas, do they? In literatire examinations PEOPLE DO OWN IDEAS. If the idea you like has been said or written by another person you have to acknowledge it by referring to who stated it and in which book. If you don't you will be accused of passing the ideas of others as your own. Independent judgement is a mature quality, possessed by students who consider the ideas of others but who do not simply acquiesce to them.

If yoy would like to read an 'informed' essay by an undergraduate university student - a former student at Hinchingbrooke - try 'Tragedy Into Comedy' by Craig Roberts in this website JOURNAL.