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When I was 5, my teacher called me up to where she sat at the front of the class to ask me some questions. It was an oral exam and all I had to do was answer a few questions she ask, get graded and that was the end of it all. Everything was going smoothly until she asked this question: "What is the first day of the week?". Having been told for as long as I can remember that Sunday was the obvious, this was the response I gave her. Sadly she told me I was wrong and the real answer was Monday, meaning I've failed that particular. Right after school closed for the day, my teacher stopped me just outside the gate to tell me I wasn't wrong but she just had to fail because the answer didn't match the one in the syllabus. I was confused and could barely make sense of what she told me. Something flipped in me that very day and I started to doubt the very concept of examination whether it truly measured knowledge or just a bunch of questions that required certain type of answers.
Examinations and tests have been seen as the most surest form of assessing knowledge acquisition for a very long time. We are expected to go to school, sit in class for lectures and practicals, read books, work on assignments and at the end of it all are expected to take exams to determine if learning has truly taken place which boils down to the final performance or grades after everything. Having good grades is automatically greeted with applause, acceptance and other benefits while having bad results is met with the opposite. Society slowly accepted this as the norm until it became a means to gauge people's value and ability. But is that how it should truly be?.
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Without any doubt, examinations do serve a very important purpose. It is used as a means of evaluating the abilities of students to confirm if they truly understand what goes around the classroom and are up to speed with the level of knowledge expected of anyone in that particular educational Qualification. Any school without tests and exams as it's means of assessment will struggle to know of the students in the school actually understand what they are doing there or not. Examinations is incredibly important, the problem only pops up when it stops being a tool for measurement and becomes the endgame.
Having spent years in the academic system being a part of different examination setups, I've watch exams produce different type of results far from its intended purposes. Many students don't even bother studying for proper comprehension anymore, they simply wait for when it's time for test of exam so that they can memorize whatever it is they need to ace this supposed obstacle only to end up forgetting everything a few hours after leaving the exam hall. Some students end up perfecting this method so effectively that they can even predict what to expect after studying patterns from the previous exams by their teachers and they continue reproducing this untill they end up with one of the best grades in their respective schools but cannot even defend their results when it truly matters in the real world. Does this really prove that exams have served their purpose or just created students who know how to beat the system?.
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When I was in university I knew a guy who was very very smart, he barely studied but somehow always had the right answer to questions especially when it was in an interactive class. Sadly for him, exams were not his strong suit. He struggled in every exam even when he knew the answers, his handwriting was really terrible so that didn't help matters. He also tried as much as possible to answer his questions the best way he could but his results always says otherwise. Everyone knew he was intelligent and yet still couldn't understand why he struggled so much with exams. Are we to say that he is a bad student simply because exams are not really his forte??.
There have also been cases where students also cheat to get good grades. They smuggle phones, textbooks or anything at all that can help them pass at the the end of the day. I know a guy who once told me "Na mumu dey study" because according to him why does he even need to when he can just prep himself with what tool that'll aid his struggle and he'll still do better than the rest that chooses to study. Some of this people with this type of mindset even get away with this all through their school year with no repercussions whatsoever or at least none that I have seen so far. They pass the exams but can we truly say their real performance was being assessed?.
Despite all of its drawbacks I still can't say that examinations doesn't really serve a purpose since there is no true alternative to fill in its shoes. My suggestion is to find what works for different students and use that to test their strengths and weaknesses but to a certain degree that still won't be enough. Exam itself is not truly the problem, the fear of it is. A lot of students read with the mindset of not learning but to prepare for the questions they'll see on their exam question papers. Maybe there is something better to, may be someone out there is working on something that'll blow our minds. I don't really know what the solution is but I am open for suggestions so if you have one please help a brother out.
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