Teaching: The Use & Abuse of the Cept

Q. What is a cept?

A. A cept is the smallest convenient unit of knowledge.

Q. Give an example of a cept.

A. I just did.

In their pursuit of academic excellence, the better liberal-arts teachers insist that their students read the original writings of the world's great thinkers and then take essay tests for comprehension of ideas rather than multiple-choice quizzes for recall of facts. This strains both the study time of the student and the grading time of the teacher—but neither has ever been shy about seeking short cuts. And, sometimes openly, sometimes secretively, a shortcut device known as the "cept" is creeping across U.S. college campuses.

The term springs from the widespread use of the cept at Princeton University, which boasts of the small, conversational classes that it calls "precepts." The cept is jokingly defined as "half a concept"—meaning that it is more than a fact but less than a philosophy, more than an epigram but less than an axiom, more than a thesis but less than a synthesis. The Princeton student has it made if he can spot these prized nuggets in rapid reading or sporadic attendance at lectures, spin them out glibly during a precept and, above all, weave them dazzlingly into an exam essay.

Handy Grading. To the cept-savvy student, cepts leap right out of the pages. In a politics course, he would readily note as a cept, "Revolutions are caused by rising expectations"; in philosophy, "To be is to perceive to be perceived"; in economics, "Calvinism caused capitalism"; in religion, "Capitalism caused Calvinism."

Some professors openly encourage ceptsmanship, stress the cept in their lectures, argue that students who retain the cepts acquire an understanding that goes beyond a rote knowledge of who said what. These teachers may also delight in the cept as a handy way of rating the quality of a student's essay in quantitative terms. They merely scan the essay, underline the cepts, assign a numerical value to each, and tot them up. Other teachers never admit they are even aware of cepts—but tacitly use them anyway in grading. Superlative ceptsmanship amounts to a canny duel between teacher and student.

The leading expert on cepts is Princeton Senior Ed Tenner, a Phi Beta Kappa who devised the "smallest convenient unit of knowledge" definition. He reports, after much research, that Princeton courses average, per lecture, 8.8 cepts in philosophy, 5.2 in American history, 4.6 in literature, a mere 1.5 in art. A student may emerge from a course with as many as 250 cepts in his notebook. Hopefully, a few rare "kilo-cepts" and "multicepts"—cepts so basic they can be applied in many courses and to almost any historical period-may turn up among them, although Tenner has been able to identify only 17 kilocepts during his four years at Princeton. Examples: "A determinist creed induces not fatalism, but the will to assist in the accomplishment of some irresistible destiny"; "Obscure third-rate thinkers are historically more important than great thinkers."