Why Focusing On Exams Only Stifles Learning And Ruins Our Life

 

Learning is a lifelong innate human capacity. We are able to survive because we are able to learn. Education is organising a certain environment to help achieve certain learning goals. While learning, by definition, is an internal process, education is externally organised. As such, its goals hardly take the needs of the learners into account. Instead, educational goals are politically motivated; it is the ministries of education that set the goals of education in any country. Paradoxically, teacher training programmes invariably highlight the importance of taking learners’ needs into consideration while planning lessons and courses.

For numerous reasons, exams have become central to education all over the world. Although standardized exams are not all too bad, they should play a less central role in education, not least because they can easily impede learning and halt creativity.

We send our children to schools simply because this is the norm if we want to live by the rules of this world. Graduating university means I can have a certificate with which I can apply for certain jobs and become useful to myself and others. No certificate means only manual work is available for me, and accordingly I would be destined to a hard life.

So, education in a sense is a way of having a seemingly easier kind of life. Parents, therefore, are happy to work as hard as they can to afford good education to their children. For them, good education often means expensive schools and universities. Graduating an expensive university has come to guarantee jobs more than academic merit or achievement. Admission to such universities always depends on sitting high-stakes standardised exams, which, regardless of quality, are bound to be limited in scope. Despite the fact that no single three-hour test can measure all the potential of a candidate, standardised, high-stakes exams are a multi-billion dollar business, giving testing companies a huge lobbying leverage politically speaking. No time soon, then, can we see an end to the exam-centric system of education.

Parents want to guarantee their children’s future. They dedicate their lives and all their resources to helping their children pass exams. These exams always focus on foreign language – namely English – maths and biology. As a result, focus has automatically shifted from learning and growing as an appreciative, multidimensional human being to getting ready for the battle of their lives: passing exams with flying colours. In a battle, soldiers don’t care much or think about anything but their mission. Such is the way of war. And if life is a war, the ammunition business must be on the boom.

Exam preparation classes and tutoring services are more popular than ever. They are. But success is still not automatic. The simple fact of the matter is that even with tremendous focus on very little content, learning is still a personal responsibility. Banks of past test papers, a multitude of preparation classes and availability of private tutoring do not automatically guarantee a desired grade for every student. On the contrary, these assets can fuel anxiety and lead to failure instead. They adversely kill creativity which requires free thinking and wide scope vision.

Furthermore, despite high-stakes tests being propagated as prioritising critical thinking skills, the narrow focus of the exam forces students and their teachers to practice ‘tips and tricks’ instead of learning and developing a wider range of skills. Consequently, students fail to transfer any skills they learn from preparing for the exam to their own personal life – which is supposedly one major goal of education.

In such a scenario – where the political weight of exams and the narrow focus of the stakeholders, parents and students – schools have come to play smaller and smaller roles in education. School is no longer valuable for students, parents or teachers. The social benefit of being in a school has diminished. Students – and their parents – no longer see the value of anything school can offer – apart from the administrative benefit of having to be enrolled in one. Group work, appreciation of art and beauty, empathy with others and the sense of belonging have – well, let’s say almost – disappeared. The grim ramification of all this is that we are rearing generations of thoughtless competitors who only care about material gain. And overall, the quality of graduates and teachers is on the decline making way for a narrow-minded zeitgeist.

We can get degrees by cramming, but cramming and learning do not go hand in hand. In life, surviving depends on more than high income. We need to provide for our life necessities, but also need to appreciate and be appreciated for who we are. A tunnel-vision approach to education kills creativity and makes the world a more hideous place to be.