Why Should Exams Be Banned ???

Hey Fonzies! Are you sick and tired of having to study all day and night just for an exam that lasts for one week and is said to determine your future? Well, fear no more! Let’s talk about some reasons why schools should ban this unforgivable torture.

Exams are standardized tests that are known to be a form of learning activity to measure students’ understanding towards a certain topic. But are exams really measuring the right things? Students tend to memorize texts from books or formulas to be used to solve mathematical problems later in exam, but after the exam is over, majority of students will forget about whatever they have memorized previously. So even if the students score well in exams, does that mean the students have really understood and mastered that topic? For closed book tests, if the answers we’ve written down is slightly longer than our peers’, it’s not because we’re smarter than them, it’s just because we have better memory; for open-book tests, it’s only about how organized our notes are so that we can refer to them quickly to copy it down onto our test paper. Hence, exams measure memory, not learning!

One common negative effect of exam is the stress that it brings to students, which leads to other severe mental illnesses too! Exams were supposed to be a form of learning, but high expectations from teachers and pressure from parents have caused it to become a competition amongst students. Many students tend to study last minute before their exam and must burn the midnight oil, thus lacking sleep decreases one’s performance the following day. When we’re unable to achieve our parents or teachers’ expectations, it creates low self-esteem in us, and we’ll gradually lose interest in studying too. Although suitable amount of stress can motivate us to learn, extreme stress will contribute to high blood pressure and other serious health issues such as depression, and that is the major factor of the increasing suicide death rate of students.

Furthermore, exams are not the best way of learning. What does it really mean to learn anyways? By definition, learning is the ability of comprehending and applying a skill in life for long term. So, schools were built as a place to learn and to nurture young minds into the future leaders of tomorrow. The main goal of schools is for students to do well in the world, that’s why schools implement tests and exams, but now, instead of preparing the new generation for the society, they are training us to do well in tests in order to evaluate our capability of doing well in the world. However, are exams really necessary for teachers to judge a student’s quality? No! No! No! Students should be given the opportunity to apply what they have learnt in school to the outside world, and not sitting down in the hall writing out whatever they have memorized from the textbook within an hour! Instead, the matter of time and belief is what we, as students, really need to prove ourselves, show our potential, and to do mistakes along the way, because tests don’t teach us about real life and ways to solve society problems, experience does, and that is the true meaning of learning.

As aforementioned, exams do not show the real ability of students, especially when cheating occurs, which is the most common issue in exams. Some students may have a bad day during the exam week and just couldn’t perform well, but that doesn’t show the actual potential of a student. Besides, every student has different learning capabilities, so it is invalid to say that all A Grade students are more successful than B Grade students. This is due to different people having unique talents and perhaps are just not good in exams. A great example would be the famous Marvel movie character Dr Strange, which was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch. He has achieved great success in his acting career, although back then he did badly in his A levels. Other than him, let’s take Steven Spielberg as another example. He’s the most renowned director in the world, with one of his most successful film production, Jurassic Park, though when he was a teenager, he got rejected by the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television 3 times due to his poor academic results. If you’re still not fully persuaded, let me introduce you to Cameron Diaz, who also dropped out of school at the age of 16 to pursue her modelling career, but now she is the highest-paid actress in the world! Hence, do you still think we need exams to tell us how successful we could be in the future? Or should we start developing our talents in order to be successful now?

On top of that, I really don’t agree with schools restricting the things we learn by creating a fixed syllabus for every level of students, and not giving us the freedom to choose what we are truly interested in learning. What is the purpose of learning something that we don’t like? If we are forced to do so, the bad exam results we get in the end would only reflect the lack of interest we had for a particular subject. In addition, schools are cutting our recess time just to hold more exams on multiple subjects that we were forced to take. Why waste time sitting for exams when we can utilize the limited time we have for more fun and interesting courses? In short, the things we learn are limited and based on a syllabus, just for the sake of passing our exams, but I strongly agree that testing is not teaching, and test preparation is not learning!

Last but not least, what’s the point of having exams with multiple choice questions when students could just simply pick an answer without understanding it and could still get the right answer? Therefore, it would become a test of luck rather than a test of knowledge. Besides, real life situations do not provide multiple choice solution, so what’s the purpose of letting students choose the right solution instead of coming up with their own solution?

In a nutshell, if banning examinations is nearly impossible, then the Ministry of Education (MoE) should really consider changing the format of examination, from written based to a more practical approach. To resolve that problem, the best way could be replacing exams with courseworks. This is a more realistic way of judging a student’s capability of thinking. Similarly, public speaking, presentations, assignments, experiments and so forth are much more creative and effective activities that helps further enhance students’ knowledge on certain topics. Personally, I think exams are just a mental torture to humankind, why have exams when it makes students feel unhappy going to school, when schools are supposed to be enjoyable?

“I failed my exam in some subjects, but my friend passed. Now he’s an engineer in Microsoft, and I am the owner,” — Bill Gates

Written by,

Xiao You

The Fonz