Pros and Cons - Debbie Newman, Ben Woolgar 2014
Examinations, abolition of
Section F. Culture, education and sport
Many education systems in the world use some form of examinations as part of their assessment of school children. In the UK in 2013, teenagers are examined at 16 years for their GCSEs, at 17 for their AS levels and 18 for their A2 levels, and many people think this represents too much testing. Some school systems use examinations once at the end of high school. Other countries such as the USA use a system of grade point averages (GPA) or coursework which rewards a child’s performance over time. Is an examination a good way of capturing a pupil’s knowledge and understanding, or does ongoing assessment and intelligence tests of aptitude provide a fairer view of attainment and intelligence?
Pros
[1] Examinations test the ability to memorise large amounts of information for short periods of time. It is well known that some students are much better at ’cramming’ and revising than others and so do better at exams, despite performing consistently less well during the course of a year’s study. Exams do not necessarily test creativity, imagination or even a flexible understanding of the principles involved in a subject; on the whole, they test the rote-learning of facts. It is therefore possible for students to idle for a year and then learn the course in a few days, just as they might successfully ’question spot’ and only revise a few topics that might come up in the exam. It is unfair that university entrance and employment prospects are based to such a large degree on examination results.
[2] The pressure attached to exams, because of their significance both for the future and the stress involved in intense revision, is extremely detrimental to the student. Not only can this pressure cause a pupil to perform less well in the exam than he or she would in a stress-free environment, it can also lead to breakdowns or worse. School drop-outs, discipline problems and even suicides are increasingly common, often due to worry about poor grades and the effect that failure in one set of exams will have on the future. Schools and parents are frequently culpable in reminding the student of the consequences of failure and hence increasing the pressure.
[3] Public exams (e.g. International Baccalaureate, A-levels) are set outside the school by examination boards, not by the teachers who are familiar with the students. This means one of two things. Either the pupils will find that the exams bear little relation to the course they have been studying, which can cause disillusionment and surprisingly poor results; or the teachers must anticipate the exams so carefully that they are enslaved to the curriculum, without the ability to adjust their syllabus to the needs of their classes. Creativity and initiative from the teachers are lost.
[4] For the most part, examinations are set and taken as if students had reached the same level of understanding at the same age. This is not true; boys and girls mature mentally at different rates, as do many individuals within the same sex. Exams make no allowance for this.
[5] Examination success frequently depends on the individual examiner who marks a certain paper. Since academics often disagree over interpretation of the same facts, a student’s essay or opinion may be thought correct by one examiner and incorrect by another. Two examiners could indeed mark the same set of papers and grade them completely differently. This is why marks given for exams are frequently moderated and raised or lowered by a second examiner — clearly the process does not provide an accurate evaluation of the candidate. Such a system also gives the impression that candidates from different years can be compared, when in fact, with ’grade inflation’, a B grade achieved by a student a year ago may be worth an A[*] today.
[6] Intelligence tests should be used instead as a more reliable indicator of a student’s potential, both for education and for employers. They do not favour the student with a good short-term memory. They may also be used to pinpoint exact strengths and weaknesses, profiling a pupil as, for example, being ’strong at logical inference while poor at lateral thinking’. These evaluations are much more useful to employers in selecting the right candidate for the right job. Meanwhile, coursework and regular evaluation should be used in school and university to make sure that students are working consistently and understanding their entire course.
Cons
[1] Examinations evaluate students’ ability to apply the knowledge they have learned to an unfamiliar question, and to communicate their knowledge to the examiner. Exams should be retained — and perhaps improved — as part of a course involving other means of evaluation such as coursework and viva voces (oral examinations).
[2] Pressure is a fact of working life, as are deadlines, and both need to be prepared for and tested. The number of people who cannot handle pressure is very small, and there is no indication that they would manage the increased workload that curricula without exams would involve. They might feel under continual pressure. Parents and teachers should encourage students to relax for exams.
[3] Exams are intended to make pupils use what they have learned to answer a question they have not encountered before. They should not be spoon-fed the answer by teachers and should expect the examinations to surprise them.
[4] The disparity in mental maturity is significant only at primary-school level, where separate tests can be set for late developers. It is also the school’s responsibility, rather than the examining boards’, to deal with pupils of different abilities, putting them into sets or forward for different examinations.
[5] At some point, opinions must be given about students, and their own teachers are much more likely to be partial than independent examiners who know them only as candidate numbers. Examiners mark primarily for knowledge and clarity of argument rather than for conclusion. Extensive moderation and examiner meetings guarantee that all papers are marked to the same standard. Whatever form of assessment you use, grade inflation could be an issue. It is not an examspecific problem.
[6] Intelligence tests are highly controversial and can only differentiate between right and wrong answers. They cannot judge whether the pupil used the right thought process in reaching the answer, and cannot measure creativity, initiative, hard work, structure and the ability to communicate. All of these qualities are evaluated by examinations. Coursework is too open to cheating by candidates (see the increasing market for buying essays on the Internet) and to teacher corruption due to the huge pressure they are under to push up grades.
Possible motions
This House would abolish the A-level.
This House would replace exams with coursework.
This House believes that exams undermine a good education.
Related topics
Co-education