This brings me to my first point. Who's to say that in an hour, a student can display and portray their true skill and knowledge of a subject to their full potential. We spend a whole year studying, a dedicated fortnight or more of nothing but revision to be tested on a small part of the syllabus (I am well aware that I am talking about essay based exams and that factual exams do cover the syllabus but I count them as a different type of exam!). For example, in my recent Politics exam we were given 40 minutes to answer the question 'Discuss the claim the Constitutional Reforms since 1997 have not gone far enough.' Now this is a question debated by political scholars around the UK, for hours upon end, and in Parliament themselves. I have studied it for half a year, with endless examples, background and elaborations on the subject bored into my mind, yet here I am with 40 minutes to plan, articulate and communicate my answer onto a page. I am clearly not going to give my most full and best answer to the question, so why make me do it.
This slides into my next point. Relevancy. In practically no situation would a politician be made to write, in 40 minutes, an essay on Constitutional Reform. Nor would an author be asked to 'Analyse the significance of Shug Avery in The Color Purple' in an hour. Or even a Psychiatrist being asked to list 2 weaknesses of questionnaires, yet this is what we are asked. Exams have no reality to them, they are merely a superficial way of arranging students into hierarchies for Unis to come and handpick from like sweets on a shelf. Exams in my view, make grades and results the pinnacle of learning, when surely interest in the subject and a better educated person should be the emphasis. We talk about 'A Grade Students' and 'C Grade Students', a student is a student, they want to learn, why should they be discriminated. Now I know I sound like a prat, 'Learning is fun, learning enriches your life', but if you made the decision to continue with college, then you appreciate learning. Otherwise you'd have done a Sir Alan and set up a business at 16. I think that when learning our subjects is made to be a chore, which it is by exams, then there is a fault in the system.
My third point is on exam discrimination. Some people just don't do exams. They can be creative geniuses, logical geniuses, linguistic geniuses, but if they freeze in exams then how will they ever get recognition and results in the education system. Other than coursework, which in itself is normally a low percentage of the grade or doesn't exist, pupils have no other outlet to show their intelligence and educational aptitude. They have to either learn how to do exams, an irrelevant practice after education, or accept that they won't do well in education. And the sad truth is that some of the most articulate, convincing speakers, simply can not do exams. And why should they have to to succeed in education?
However, it must be said that I am at a loss for any other system that would work. A more liberal system that included choices of grade allocations such as dissertations, examinations and presentations would no doubt cause controversy. There would be much deliberation on how to compare and contrast the competency in which someone verbally presented a point and someone who answered a question with pen and paper. It seems to me that despite the blood, sweat and tears that exams cause, they are a necessary evil in getting through the education system. Unless anyone else has a suggestion...
No comments:
Post a Comment