Many students dislike exams and children of all ages seem to have a diet of more and more exams that they have to take. Coursework is being discredited as a way of demonstrating knowledge as it is becoming easier to plagiarise or even buy coursework over the internet. This leaves exams as the only obvious choice, but do they accurately & fairly test students' knowledge?
Yes because
Academic competence and intelligence are not straightforward to measure and no method will fully capture the scope of a student's ability, but the fact remains that we need at least some formal system, otherwise the academic system will not work.
We need divisions between ability levels and the amount of experience and knowledge students actually possess, otherwise students will be in environments unsuited to them and won't be able to learn properly. There is no other way to divide them than by testing them in a fair and impartial manner. Exams are good at this because they are not vague - they have clear, measurable guidelines.
No because
Guidelines are neither clear nor measurable. Students are duped into believing their innate abilities and potential are being tested whilst they are largely being tested on test-taking ability, confidence and pushiness.
What this system encourages is practicing past papers in the hopes of mastering tests and not the subject. Tests do not encourage the pursuit of knowledge so much as the pursuit of great grades. Education should free the mind not restrict it to guidelines that are NOT transparent (As the pandemic of misunderstood Andagogy (opposite of pedagogy) keeps teachers from spoon-feeding or spelling things out).
Intellectual exploration is impeded with constant pulls towards mastering guess work and memorising 'standard' methods of answering 'repeated types' of questions that were originally set to test a student's response to unfamiliar problems.
Subjective/qualitative papers with essay questions are not as easy to measure as mathematics or other quantitative papers. There are times when different examiners grade the same paper by the same student/pupil very differently.
Marks on tests are frequently altered on students' coercion or a teacher/examiner's admittance of human error on his/her part. Pushier/convincing students can push examiners/tutors into raising their grades and exercise this talent frequently.
Tests simply require students to cram when studying, and after the test is taken, the information studied is almost immediately forgotten, so the purpose of the test in the first place is gone.
culled from www.infomaniamag.com
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