Catch21 Productions | Examining Exams

Examining Exams

I am one of the millions of people that hate exams and through all my years of study, preparing for exams was the one thing I hated most. In recent times though exams are being attacked from all sides. It's being claimed that they are too easy and there are constantly revelations about how papers have been leaked.

I read today that teachers were 'coaching' students on exams by giving them hints about what was on the exam papers. This has been going on for years, teachers predict on what comes on papers and try and brush their students up on it and the people that are complaining about it should remember that it happened in their time too.

I don't see the point of exams to be honest, I've never gone into work needing to memorise the peoples names or dates. Schools should be a tool not just for imparting knowledge but should also prepare people for working life and the best way to this is to give them real skills (which don't include memory retention!)

My politics course at university for example was coursework based with only a few exams and I think this the way forward. With coursework you learn how to put into practice the what has been learnt and put a real life context on things which exams fail to do. This is just one of the benefits, others like spreading coursework deadlines over the year will will do away with the stress and panic that many students feel at the end of the year. The most important advantage to me would be giving those who struggle with the current education system more year round support.

Photo courtesy of sashamd @ flickr

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Grace
Posts: 2

Re: Examining Exams
Reply #2 on : Thu June 05, 2008, 17:17:28

Whilst I agree with your point about the need for year round support, and less school time spent coaching for exams, I have to completely disagree with your implication that exams are simply to test memory retention.

I also studied politics at University and in that case essays throughout the year were the best way for me to research in depth the topic, learn loads and produce a good piece of work. However, are you entirely forgetting about Maths and the Sciences? In my secondary school experience of these subjects, coursework seemed only to test how good your teacher was at coaching you and which students had teacher-parents. On the other hand exams levelled the playing field somewhat and took away the teacher support. You can't memorise the answer to some calculus equation- to perform well on that exam question you need a good understanding of calculus generally.

Also, kids have a hell of a lot of homework as it is. Surely childhood should be about what you learn outside the classroom as well. I feel that adding more coursework to what is an already heavy burden throughout the year, would take away time kids have to spend on extra curricular activities. It would also further disadvantage pupils with less stable home lives as they would not be able to consistently devote the time coursework requires. A couple of weeks of exams isn't that heavy a price to pay for a social life the rest of the year.

Additionally learning to cope with stress and panic is pretty important as you often find in life that all the s**t stacks up at once.

Kiran
Posts: 2

Re: Examining Exams
Reply #1 on : Fri June 06, 2008, 10:33:25

First of all thanks for you comment Grace is good to see that someone is passionate about the issues that are affecting young people.

I would agree with you that the Maths and Science coursework projects are coached by teachers but I'm sure if we changed systems to a coursework focused way of testing children these practices would be stamped out. I'm not saying that we should completely cut out exams though, I think they do have a purpose like testing how well people understand their subject matter but I think the ratio is wrong. I would have to disagree with you point about memorising maths answers, when marking papers the answers only count of 1 or 2 points, the working out is what gets you most of the marks and formulas can be memorised.

I take you point about homework bit it could be integrated into the coursework, and I know it could be levelled that parents could do the work for their children but any good parent would help their child understand a subject rather than doing the work for them.

Learning to cope with stress is important but like you said children at that age should be enjoying themselves and its been proven time and time again people learn more when they are enjoying themselves and children do not enjoy stress. Coming from a school in East London where the education standards were not that high the gifted children would always get good grades regardless of how they were tested, I saw people who were not as gifted struggle greatly in their exams, a lot of them just walked out having not written anything on the paper. That image has stuck with me and I think the government need to address the education gap that there quite obviously is.

Please feel free to comment on anything else on the Catch21 website or email me directly.

Kiran
(kirant@catch21.co.uk)