How about those exams?

Truly a stressful period in ones life. Where your competence is supposedly measured and your future is decided. Society has constructed a method that will attempt to measure a persons sagacity in the hope that from the results, they can place the person in a suitable occupation. So the persons aptitude for success is in pugnacious competition with the demands of the job. But I do not think this method of assessment is acceptable.

I do not think that exams are terrible and that everything should be changed; I think that when people are undertaking exams, there should be many factors taken into consideration, and maybe change it up a bit. Though I cannot offer a solution to what’s wrong with exams (I’d imagine that an issue of this magnitude would be discussed by many smart people of different professions around an enormous table in coffee-stained shirts) I can however provide you with a whole heap of information about how exams are stupid.

The basic procedure of exams as I understand is that a particular student walks into a building with other students, sits down and then begins completing their paper. What I find wrong with exams is that there are many psychological factors that can interfere with the result. I also find distaste with an exam being used as a tool to measure a persons intelligence. And a nasty case of bad luck ruining a students future is also unacceptable.

I think I can safely say that exams are stressful; very stressful. I mean, it’s basically a ‘if you fail, you’re screwed’ type of situation. I remember reading a psychology book (Neuro-linguistic programming by Robert Dilts, John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Judith DeLozier) in which it says that most students associate stress or anxiety with tests and that it will be detrimental to your performance. So wait a minute. Because of this aspect of human nature that causes you to perform worse than you would have, a student would get a worse result than they deserve. Upsetting I say.

How come we do exams? Society thinks it is the way to measure a persons mental capacity: how smart they are. Goodness, gracious and gosh, some silly little test is going to tell us how smart we are. Huh, that’s strange, especially considering I.Q. tests are thought to be poor indicators of intelligence by some people. But screw them, say I.Q. tests determine how smart you are, and since exams determine how smart you are, shouldn’t exams test the criteria in I.Q. tests? I seriously doubt when you walk into the exam hall or whatever that your going to feast your eyes upon a paper saying ‘Part 1: Pattern recognition’.

And anyways, Emotional Intelligence is supposedly a better indicator for how successful you’ll be.