Abolish exams!

Life should not be evaluated by tests, it should be judged by performance.

I KNOW how to manipulate a Rubik’s Cube so that all six sides are the same colour. I didn’t learn it in school, it wasn’t a course that I had to sit for in university, and I didn’t have to pass an exam for it.

I learnt how to do it because I wanted to know how to solve it, I went out and got the skills required, and kept at it until I got it. Why can’t the rest of our education system be like that?

As usual at this time of the year, there is a lot of talk about exams. Sometimes it’s about how students that should get scholarships don’t. Other times, it’s about how children spend their days chasing results. At the end of it all, it’s always about how the number of As one gets is not the measure of a true person’s worth. We know this and yet we spend a lot of time obsessing over it.

I know the perfect solution for all this. Get rid of exams.

I mean, get rid of UPSR, SPM, STPM. So many people say that sitting for examinations was the worst experience of their lives. So why do we want something that causes so much misery in our children? Throw it out.

I’m not saying that assessment is not important, but we seem to give a lop-sided importance to exams. Assessment is a way of checking if somebody understands or knows a particular skill (or knowledge). What is 2 + 2? Can you drive a car?

However, we constantly place the wrong emphasis on assessment for achievement – we make it an end in itself – when it can also be used as a tool to judge progress.

So, at the moment, when you say 2 + 2 = 11, we say, “You have failed”, when we should instead say, “You need to keep exploring what 2 + 2 is”. And when you do say 2 + 2 = 4, we should then ask, “When is the right answer 11?”

Use assessment as a way to find the boundaries so you can stretch them a little more.

The other problem with exams is that they are like a single snapshot of what you are meant to have learned over the years. What you really should be interested in is how your knowledge grew over time. A video instead of a picture, if you like. If you see continual progress at an acceptable rate, then that in itself should be a good thing. If you find that people are just not learning, then that’s a problem to be solved, not a way of labelling somebody a reject.

If you think about it, in the real world, we assume a continuous assessment when it comes to evaluating people. We don’t say, here take this test, how you do determines how much you earn next year. We look at the contribution over the year.

Another thing that gets me is when exams test what you can say about doing something, instead of whether you can do it or not. Want to see if a kid can throw a ball? Don’t ask him to write down how he would do it, just give him the darned ball and watch him throw it.

So I say, throw out the exam system and instead, look for ways to fulfil the potential in each child, whichever direction it may take. Yes, at the moment in Malaysia, teaching does not cater for this kind of individualised learning.

At the other end of the scale, I also understand why people say that exams are important. Without them we can’t send children to universities.

I wish I could say this is utter nonsense; the best I can do is call it “kinda nonsense”. I think there is a correlation between exam grades and the ability to succeed in university (“succeed” means being truly qualified to get a degree, and not the ability to maximise party time in a limited space). And higher education is important in that it provides learning for certain jobs and skills that happen to pay quite well.

But, to say that you with your 8As and 1C are more qualified to learn than someone with 4As and 6Bs is nonsensical. To gripe, “He did better, he should go through”, implies that learning is a privilege you hand out to a select few.

Education should not be about placing barriers so that those who can’t jump over them are denied further access. It should be about taking the most advantage of a person’s capacity. It should be about being the best that we can be, whoever we are.

Okay, so we have limited resources. Not everyone can fit into a lecture hall at the same time, for example. But we have technology. We have the ability to put knowledge at everyone’s fingertips. Everyone can learn anything from anywhere.

We already have the National Service programme taking teenagers from all over the country and putting them into camps. I think it would be an idea to consider using a similar platform to assess whether students are suited for university. Give them university-like tasks for a month and assess their readiness for learning.

As for those who aren’t ready, we should also teach them how they can use technology to teach themselves. There is a whole universe on the Internet. I know, that’s where I learnt how to solve Rubik’s Cube.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make of life’s vagaries and contradictions.

Love,

Weimund(Lesley)