Examinations exert a pernicious influence on education

Taking exams

According to Oscar Wilde, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”, so taking an exam is, above all, gaining experience due to our mistakes that cannot be avoided not only during the exam itself, but also during the preparing for it.

Everyone has to do exams. There’s no way of avoiding them. They seem to be the things that are used in the modern world as a means of sorting our society into groups. Just everybody is finding his or her kind of level. So whether you like it or not, you can’t avoid it.

I do remember my first exam at school. It was one on history. I was desperately preparing for it quite a long time, for about 3 weeks I’d been burning the midnight oil in order to remember all the facts and dates. I didn’t like history, so I just learned it parrot fashion. Thought, I don’t approve of swotting, but if you want to pass the exam on the subject that isn’t interesting to you, with flying colours, there is nothing, but that.

There’s great nervousness about taking an exam, spending some weeks shut up in your room. But of course the degree of stress depends on the exam itself. If you know a lot about this subject, so it will be dead easy to get through.

We have exams in winter session and in summer one. So after the exams are over, obviously, you feel great relief. Summer is a really bad time for beinghave to sit in a room and have to think and concentrate on the preparing. It’s quite difficult to get down to some serious work. After the exams are over, we have holidays ahead of us, which is a great bonus really. So it’s almost a compensation for the suffering.

Examinations exert a pernicious influence on education

There are different opinions regarding this way of thinking, I reckon. Someone can speak about the importance of examinations and others, on the contrary, will argue on it and show you its destructive and primitive features. On the one hand, exams have come to play an important part in our educational career. They are a reliable method of checking, to which we all have accustomed. But on the other hand, students are afraid of them. Exams are considered to be so-called “anxiety-makers” because of the stress they cause. So much depends on them. There should be invented something less stressful, than exams. But as for me – I have no idea. Some people argue that an exam tests only a certain kind of skill. They say that many people have a good memory and a special ability to pass exams with flying colours, or they simply crib. So they have no capacity for original thought or imagination. I disagree and I think that everything depends on a person himself. Today, the syllabuses are so extensive, that a student cannot pass an exam extremely with the help of his memory! The today’s student must not only have a fair knowledge of the subject, but also be able to show his intelligence and the power of reasoning. So, the fact, that a student has passed an exam, indicates some of his mental power as well as his grasp of the subject. Exams compel students read a lot, as much, as they can. Of course you can read or not. But if you do so, you’ll absorb knowledge unconsciously.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 8888