'effin Exams...

Property of the Cord Newspaper, Wilfrid Laurier University; and the writer (me)


It’s the most wonderful time of the year... oh wait, is it really that wonderful? Spending copious amounts of time with my nose in books and staring blankly at notes from lecture notes, I’m wondering to myself: “what’s the POINT?” Well, really exams are supposed to demonstrate evidence of learning in a course, but I think they’re just demonstrative of memorization and concentration: two things I really am terrible at. As the daughter of a professor I’ve seen my dad pour over exams and wonder where he went wrong with his students-- the truth is, that maybe the students weren’t learning what he thought they were, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t learn at all. I’ve taken knowledge from courses completely irrelevant to the syllabus or academic calendar, yet ended up applying it over and over. I’ve learned that learning itself isn’t one-dimensional and we all learn in different combinations of ways, whether it is by listening, or visualising, or teaching it to others.
Exams aren’t exactly my preferred method of testing, as sitting in a room with tons of other people isn’t distracting enough, you have the usual coughs and sneezes, the latecomers, the early leavers, and the proctors who seem to plan on wearing their noisiest of footwear. The end result is a distracted student who can’t help but drift off into a world of daydreaming.

The problem here is that our minds simply aren’t adjusted anymore to this mode of intense knowledge-regurgitation; we are constantly stimulated by our phones, by our friends and especially by those LCD TVs that follow you everywhere on campus. Examinations aren’t any fun for someone with a legitimate concentration issue, and they sure aren’t fun for the rest of us-- strung-out on caffeine and buggy-eyed from lack of sleep-- we’re simply no longer in shape for this kind of mental exercise.

There are those who succeed at the examination process, and there are those who fail miserably. Some of these people lie at opposite ends of the grading spectrum, and it’s that big essay at the end of the course that keeps them from failing, rather than a formal exam. Formal exams are more often than not in my personal experience, NOT an accurate measure of knowledge learned in the course but an accurate measure of one’s ability to memorize. Being able to regurgitate or guess the right answer may be fine for passing an exam but it certainly does not affirm into knowledge gained.

So exams are, essentially, turning into an extremely inconvenient formality, lowering the averages of many first years and prolonging the November stress – such an unfair imposition upon students. I personally don’t see why-- if everyone learns in different ways-- can’t examinations and testing be conducted accordingly?

...Hardly seems fair