How Education Is Failing To Fulfil Its Duty

As a professional teacher of some forty years, teaching wide range of age groups covering quite a variety of subjects in languages and the arts, I have long since come to the conclusion that exams are not a good way to achieve what they are supposed to achieve.

The Prime purpose of an exam is to establish, or to confirm, that learning has taken place and to what degree. Contrary to what many people believe, exams are not a sign of levels of intelligence. Exams are a test of class room attention, understanding and memory. And all too often it is that last one that most commonly lets the student down. We have all had that feeling of frustration when, in moments of stress, our memory deserts us and we fail at something very important that we set out to do well.

There are other problems with exams which can cause a student problems. I well remember one high school exam when a thunderstorm was raging outside and totally distracted every candidate in the exam room.

On another occasion when I took a very important exam at university in a room on the first floor, just above the main entrance on the ground floor. As exams in the UK are taken at the end of the academic year, well into the hot days of summer, all windows have to be kept open, unless the room has air conditioning, which ours didn't.

Five minutes after the start of the exam some drunken, vagabond beggar posted himself at the main entrance and began to beg from people coming out of the entrance door. When he was refused money he let rip with a string of obscene expletives that would make the Devil himself blush with embarrassment. It took far too long for somebody to go down try to move on the culprit. And the act of politely asking him to leave just made him worse.

In one of my university finals exams, the department of Art and Design History decided to lump part-time undergraduates with the full time ones. Although we had all studied the same course, there were divergences in the exam papers for each group. Who ever put the papers out gave the full time students the part time paper and the part time students the full time paper. To say we struggled would be to put it mildly. We soldiered on suspecting something was amiss, but could only confirm it at the end of the exam when we spoke with the other group of students.

These are just a few examples of what can go wrong in an exam, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ill health, periods, cheating, all have to be considered. In all, it seems to me that any advantages are by far outweighed by a plethora of disadvantages. Is there a better way? Yes there is, a much better way.

I have long been a proponent of the efficacy of a system of teacher controlled coursework. That is to say that the students do the coursework under controlled conditions invigilated by the teacher. The students would not be allowed to take the work home as this too would be open to abuse. The work would be done in class time and would be kept locked in a secure place in a staffroom locker only accessible to the teacher in question.

I do believe that adopting this system would level the playing field and give all students a much fairer chance of achieving their full potential. Sadly, I fear that educational institutions are too attached to the systems of traditional exams, even being only too well aware of all of its short comings. However, continued resistance to change will only serve to continue to short change the very people the teaching profession is supposed to care about. Maybe a full official review at the highest levels of our education systems will do the trick and result in instigating the revolutionary change that is needed, for everybody's benefit.