Good to see you here again Xo.
Personally, I hate exams. I never did well in them. I am a very hands on learner. Cramming a lot of information and spewing it out in one big test is something my tiny brain simply cannot handle. I also have a short attention span that means 15 minutes into studying or writing a test, my brain is darting in all sorts of crazy directions. That is why I wish there were no exams, but more creative hands on testing processes.
However, that being said you actually cannot do away with exams. Actually, the ideal learning model for optimum learning, development and testing is one teacher to every ten-fifteen students so the teacher can cater to various learning styles with maximum efficiency. Unfortunately, that is a pipe dream. Unless it is an elite private school even countries like USA tend to have twenty to thirty students a classroom. Universities have even more. In a densely populated country like India teachers often have a class of 80-120 students. Even in private schools the numbers range from 30-80.
Exams serve as the simplest, most efficient way to test students. It can be standardized and quantified to test each student at a more or less similar level. They are a benchmark to gauge learning and see which students are ahead of the scale and which students are lagging behind. Without these standard exams we would not know where each student stands as teachers have no way of correctly gauging each student.
Yes adaptive teaching and testing models that change based on students style are better – but it is next to impossible if not impossible itself. How do we train teachers on this? How do we quantify and compare students to see where exactly they stand? How do we make it fair and objective, and not subjective based on teacher/learner bias? Most importantly how do we get the time and investment needed to properly do each child justice in such a model.
I was lucky that my parents never let my exam performances effect me or put undue pressure on me. They recognized my strengths and weaknesses and were fair about it. Despite peer pressure and system pressure, they told me it was not a big deal and as long as I did my best it did not matter. I flunked some exams here or there, and yes they chewed me out over the laziness aspect of it. But they always instilled the confidence to go back and do better. Even during my SSC, I was allowed to go visit my cousins in Goa over winter break, I used my "study month" before the test to complete Duke Nukem 3D. They knew I was actually smart and would only get on my case over laziness. They knew what fields I wanted to pursue, what I needed to do for that, and what I was actually doing – they never pressured me to do something I was not simply for the elite factor attributed to it.
I was also very fortunate to have teachers also who never attributed me as 'dumb'. Of course there were a few teachers who did that, because of some atrocious exam scores, as well as those kids who always think they are smarter than everyone. However, a few teachers seemed to see that exams were not my forte; but I had smarts above and beyond the conventional classroom.
Our system does have problems and it is not the most efficient. Exams due put undue stress on students and can have disastrous consequences as exemplified in movies like 3 Idiots. They do not measure interest, aptitude or as Xo mentioned any passion for learning. It does not account for learning disabilities, common youth traits like short attention spans, easy irritability and loss of interest. It does not account that different people learn and express differently. However, exams and standardized tests are still the best way to test and gauge students and decide whether to move then up or down.
The blame cannot be placed 100% on the systems of exams though. For one parents at best have a one to five children on an average. They have plenty of time to recognize and understand their children. We need to reeducate parents to know that the system is not the know all and end all. They to have a role in a child's development. One's own child ought to be more than an exam score, a grade report or a statistical percentile. Parents are responsible to recognize that and be the support that helps them through the system not breaks them.
Secondly teachers as well as students ought to be made aware that exams are just the most efficient test, not the absolute perfect and only test of one's intellect. That at the end of the day no one is superior simply because they could cram and spew, and no one is dumb because they did not get something. Even if people within the system don't have the time or money to teach and test uniquely – every human has the time to treat each other as humans who are more than test scores.
