Why do exams suck? You have 90 minutes. Your time starts now!
Imagine the situation: you’ve just started a cushy graduate job and your new boss marches in: “Right. I want a report on the results from the last quarter. I want it in three hours, done from memory, and written by hand on that wobbly single person table over there.” Not going to happen, is it? Yet exams are still around – and like the proverbial hula-hoop – will be a-round for ever.
Exams bug me for a few reasons, and the main one is pretty selfish: I’m crap at them. I never do as well as I should, partly because I never prepare for them properly, but mainly because they’re designed to show you at your worst.
Rather than allowing you to take time to ponder and develop an argument, you have to simply vomit something out as quickly as you can. Despite the fact that you type every other single piece of work for university, you’re expected to write them by hand. And what do they prove? That within a short period of time, you can regurgitate some memorised facts and arguments – Well Done.
Exams bug me for a few reasons, and the main one is pretty selfish: I’m crap at them.
Exams do not encourage individual, original thought. They do not encourage learning for the sake of it. All they do is encourage you to rape your subject, reduce it to a few memorable, pithy arguments and facts and then reproduce them in a semi-legible form, surrounded by 400 people doing the same.
Admittedly, this criticism applies largely to essay based subjects – particularly the poncier ones, like history, philosophy, English and politics (hobby degrees, I like to call them) – and not so much to science degrees, or engineering. There’s a certain element of hoop jumping in the latter subjects – i.e. wrong answers actually exist; you can’t just make up some bollocks and scrape a third like in Arts subjects – which make exams seem a reasonable means of assessment, but for essay subjects, this doesn’t hold.
It’s peculiar that in an age where nearly every fact or detail is accessible in seconds via the Internet, syllabuses still obsess over the regurgitation of a tiny number of memorised pieces of information in frankly odd circumstances. Exams are bad for the pupil, as they encourage a crammed, shallow education. Exams are bad for teachers and professors, who have to wade through hundreds of often illegible scripts. So what are they good for? Absolutely nothing.*
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