My problem with exams…
I am, amongst other things, a second year IT student at the University of Reading in the UK. This time of year for me, and thousands of other students, is a nightmare as we prepare for the onslaught of exams. Exams are something that have been deemed necessary by the ‘system’ at practically every level of education for decades.
Whether you’re in primary school doing your SATs, in secondary school taking your GCSEs, or at University sitting your end of year exams they’re inescapable for the most part – and one of the most stressful times in any student’s life.
I am one of the many students that doesn’t test well. I can speak to you for hours on a topic, write for pages, but sit me down in any kind of formal examination and I fall apart. No amount of revision seems to fully prepare me for that moment when I turn over the paper and quickly realise that my mind is completely blank! Many of my friends hate the fact that I often fill conversation gaps with utterly useless information but I can’t seem to apply this skill at hoarding info-crap to remembering important things like the topics in my exams!
Partly for this reason I am against traditional examining methods. Studying a topic for 20+ weeks, completing coursework tasks based on the knowledge acquired, and learning how to apply it in ‘the real world’ is all well and good but then being asked to effectively cram that acquired knowledge into your short-term memory ready to pour it out onto paper is a tall order for anybody. Especially if you’re not good at essay writing,
Even if you do thoroughly revise your module you still have a massive gamble when the paper is there in front of you: did you revise the right topics fully enough, will ‘that’ question come up that you hated in the past papers, is there anything you’ve forgotten?
I think it is safe to say that I see the traditional as at best a lottery; an unpredictable way of testing people on a randomly selected subset of topics from a broad module. How can this be seen as fair; as a true representation of a person’s ability in a given field? Yet, upwards of 60% of our degree courses are based on the results of these two-hour torture sessions.
The solution, you ask? I would like to see Universities, and the broader system in general, adopt more modern methods of assessment. Use technology to help extract the assessment. If you’re studying a course where writing has gone the way of the dinosaur (as is the case in many IT based degrees) then don’t expect your students to sit and physically handwrite for two hours. Instead create an environment where students can fully apply their knowledge, skills, and abilities electronically. Use strong, goal-rich, coursework to fully test students understanding of a subject – not 10 week epic undertakings, but short tasks that can be completed in a few days but that cover all topics over the course of the module.
We’re often told of how people have a measurable, but short, attention span of as little as 10 minutes out of an hour, so why do examiners think that 2 hours in front of lined paper and a question booklet is a sensible, fair, and accurate way to assess?
Let’s catch up to the 21st century and begin examining in a more modern way!
There are too many facets to this to answer in one go, and I wouldn’t want to defend any particular system.
But one issue I would like to know your views on is deep learning.
Some students seem only to want to scratch the surface of the subjects they are studying, and I am not sure how “bite size” assessments would encourage deeper engagement.
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I sympathise with you. I too, have thought alot about what the actual value of exams are. The trouble is, how do you actually test what a student has learned and retained? It did occur to me that developing an exam technique could be useful in later life when you have to absorb a brief quickly and under pressure and deliver it (as in the current Party Leader debates)or at a press conference. I personally don’t think that any amount of quality coursework can replace exam assessment: I don’t think students would make the genuine commitment – it’s human nature to cut corners if you can. An exam forces the student to revisit the material and commit to it (much as I hate exams). However, for what it’s worth this is how I cope with it.
One: I reduce the course material (or revision slides) to bullet points on index cards. Two: I reduce the bullet points to acronyms and keywords. Three: I push myself to really understand the concepts whilst I pace around like a squawking parrot learning the keywords by heart.
Once in the exam, I make time management my absolute priority. I find that if I learn it in this way and I have created a “thread” in my brain which is triggered by a keyword, then some of the stuff I have parroted in seems to stick. Anway, again, I do sympathise – it is really stressful (and Year Three is worse!) so wishing you good luck!
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Shirley, thanks for reading and commenting.
I agree that “bite-size” assessment can have the negative side-effect of only encouraging surface learning; obviously this is not going to provide the student with anything more than quote-worthy knowledge of their subject, and certainly wouldn’t be able to prove their ability to apply it to a given situation.
Instead, I think more applied mini-challenges could be used – still simple and short in their approach (perhaps cumulative over the duration of the module), but rather than asking the student to outline their knowledge either by reproduction or verbatim copying, require them instead to show application and interpretation by applying what they’ve learned to solving a real (or fictitious) problem.
I’m not sure what the best solution to the problem is but as someone who doesn’t do very well in exams, I feel very strongly that there must be an alternative.
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My biggest bug bear with exams is that they do not mirror the situation a real world engineer (outside of the military) is faced with. Never have I had a situation where I must make an immediate answer to a complex question without the availability of resources. Open book exams are far more fair as they test your ability to find information and effectively use it. Closed book exams are simply an exercise in memory, and that’s not realistic.
Coursework must better reflects the work a real worker does in the real world. Asking a Doctor to remember and then diagnose one of two hundred possible conditions in an exam is unrealistic as in most cases they will be able to grab a book and check the symptoms – it’s the same in engineering, computer science and I imagine most other jobs. There may have been a time when knowing everything made you valuable but “these days” the ability to find and digest information quickly is far more important.
I would be happier with exams if they were all open book, shorter (concentrating on distilling information, essays can be written as coursework) and worth less. A two hour exam being worth upwards of 40% of a course is lunacy – 10% perhaps is more fair. If it takes 20 hours to teach, plus 20 hours to revise, it takes more than 2 hours to prove you know it.
The clever part is trying to find ways to stop students from cheating and working together, thereby meaning everyone gets the same mark as the “smartest” member of the course. However this is a challenge for the academic staff, not for individuals like me
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Ah yes, exams. I miss them, greatly. I too, however, also used to think exams were the wrong way of assessing. Not, like you, because I have inherent difficulty with them, but because I am fortunate enough to find them ridiculously easy in comparison to turning out good quality course works week after week. I only stayed in 2 exams for the whole allowed period during my undergrad, once totally against my will (an evil invigilator didn’t allow me to leave when I had finished) and once because I had a serious headache and was engaged in proving why one of the questions was unanswerable (which it was, it just took a while to *prove* that it was).
Which sounds like me saying Nyah nyah na naaah na. But the reason I didn’t think exams were a good assessment was precisely because I could see other people struggled with them. It never struck me as fair that I could breeze through, sit a bunch of exams (which I always thought were the best learning opportunity of the year), and get decent grades while other people, people who put the effort in and deserved the credit for it, struggled through revision and exams and came off worse.
Given most people experience something closer to the latter condition, success in exams is taken as meaning you are the sort of person who can cope with the stresses, deal with the requirement to memorise things you have no reason to know off the top of your head in the real world, and regurgitate them for the examiner. I always felt that my exam results were a ‘bit of a lie’ by comparison to all that.
The problem is, not only will students cut corners (because, as far as I can tell, many of them have no desire to learn the subject at all, but just want to get a bit of paper saying they have passed), a large number of them will actively cheat. Exams are harder to cheat in than course works are (I think).
I actually think longer, more involved, course works would be a better option. Something which builds on the previous work you have done, rather than many bite sized bits’n'bobs. Why? Well, for starters it means that if someone is going to cheat, they will have to do so consistently or it will be noticeable. But more importantly, you hardly ever learn anything in real life in isolation – you build on your existing knowledge. It helps you to see how things fit together, and, done properly, can end up with you having a ‘product’ in which you can have a good sense of pride.
To be honest, and I know I am probably the wrong person to comment on this bit, I always wonder why people complain about exams only covering a subset of the course. I am sure we could design exams which covered the whole syllabus. You would probably have to do them for about 20 hours, of course, and the lecturers would undoubtedly not be wildly happy about marking them, but it could be done. Effectively, the exam is way of taking a random sample of your understanding. The *idea*, in my opinion, is that students should learn the material in the syllabus and that should enable them to get a bare pass. Beyond that they should show they have read around the subject, can apply the ideas in it to other, similar, problems and be able to pass sensible critiques on the methods, techniques and practices related to it. But I guess that is an old fashioned view of Higher Education. These days, it is more like a sausage factory…
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The value in exams has never been the exam itself but the requisite learning students do in order to achieve a passing grade.
Unfortunately, educational institutions are being forced in to the position where they tailor their curriculum to the exam itself – so instead of being taught the subject itself, students are instead being taught how to pass an exam in it.
Another significant problem is the broadening of the areas exams must cover. Take Computer Science for example – in my first year I had a 30 credit (4hrs/week) “Programming” module. There was a single 1hr exam that was meant to cover object-oriented programming and Java in their entirety. It didn’t. As such, most graduates (many with first class degrees) have no idea how to write even basic computer programs in any language.
It would have been better to run the module with at least triple the teaching hours (12hrs/week minimum) and split the 30 credits over 6 5 credit exams, each covering a particular facet of the module. The learning required to pass would have been far greater, achieving the goal of ensuring students have the most complete education they can.
To summarise my point: exams have their place, but they need to be used better – the culture of requiring certain pass-rates should be abolished in favour of more complete, challenging and yet bitesize exams that encourage students to actually learn the subject. Not just how to pass it.
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P.S. Someone needs to alert every CS department in the country that forcing technophiles to handwrite for 2 hours is akin to torture.
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Also, I’d like to express my dislike for coursework in Universities. On paper it looks like a good idea, but in practice students simply club together and the stronger students end up doing all the work.
It also forces students already familiar with the material to jump through some incredibly mundane hoops that just (in their mind at least) devalue the degree significantly. Jumping through mundane hoops for 2 hours is acceptable. Doing it for a solid week is not.
Incidentally, this is exactly why I failed both my “Web Development” and “Information Systems” (databases) modules at University. They failed to engage me with coursework that was simple, banal and utterly disinteresting.
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