While I might not be old enough at the moment to have experienced the ‘Horrors’ of exams, I have given a fair amount of them, and I can confidently say that I’m not a huge fan of giving a bunch of tests or examinations that are defined as an educational assessment intended to measure a test-takers knowledge, skill, aptitude, physical fitness, or classification in many other topics.
You see, Albert Einstein once said and I quote “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its entire life believing that it is stupid.” Evolution has taken huge steps for many years now, for example, we all own phones and cars in the present, right? There’s a huge difference in how phones and cars looked 155 years ago. Now let’s google an image of a classroom from 155 years ago. Can’t see the difference between the classrooms now and then? That is because it has not changed a bit in more than a century, including standardized tests. You see, these standardized tests were invented by Fredrick F. Kelly who said, and I quote, “These tests are too crude to be used and should be abandoned.”
But, countries like Finland are doing impressive things where they have shorter school days, teachers get a decent wage, homework is non-existent and they focus on collaboration instead of competition. You see, there are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from the one exam at the end of students’ senior year. There are no rankings, no comparisons, or competition between students, schools, or regions.
It’s not just exams that have a loophole in our education system, long school hours, lots of homework, assignments that have to be submitted within a certain time limit, all of these factors in for the fact that it is not just exams is a loophole in our educational system but it is a huge one that can be fixed by making them objective type or even reducing the amount of homework that we get. While this is a topic on which I can talk all day long, I would like to summarise and say that not a lot of people are addressing this issue since they are not aware of how big of an issue this is.
