Just_give_it_a_thought

Exam or No Exam

The topic investigates the pros and cons of the sudden dictate of conducting no exams. The article highlights the danger involved in non conduction of exams at present.  

https://www.researchgate.net  , https://link.springer.com , https://pz.harverd.edu ,

Whatever pedagogy the world education system is following, all of them are written exam based. Years of practice has firmly instilled the same in the understanding and behaviour of educationists, teachers, parents and students.

Sudden arrival of Covid-19 has put a big question mark on our exam system. Everyone is compelled to think ‘out of the box’ of other and innovative ways to promote the students to the next standard. This raises many doubts : Are we ready at the moment to promote the students without exams? Is our education system  that much equipped to  change and adopt a new system overnight? Will it be proper from the students’ point of view to do so?

A system without written exam would require entirely a different approach; a special set of tools to assess and check the progress of the students. We will have to follow a task oriented system of education. The tasks should be easy to observe and translate in terms of numbers or grades through out the curriculum.

At present, internal marking focuses on providing maximum benefit to support a ‘good’ final result. We can’t change this mentality overnight. We will have to create new generation teachers, who are good at task management; who know what to observe; how to observe and when to observe; who know how to keep the record in the form of data and transform it for grading.

It is quite clear the current text books should be transformed to Task books or Manuals where learning takes place by accomplishing the graded tasks. The student will ‘learn by doing’ utilizing enquiry and research while completing the given task.

Task based system would also demand removal of time pressure. At present time pressure implies completing the tasks and projects misguides the student to copy-paste or to copy from their friends’ notes.

Dear reader, I hope it is quite clear that at present we are not ready to adopt the new system having no exams or end of the year exam.

In the given circumstance it seems  that we are denying the students the opportunity for their proper growth and development by not letting them appear in the end of the year exam. It is a very lame excuse that we have removed the stressful situation the students were in by promoting them on the basis of internal marking.

Teaching stress management is of prime importance. If the student is ill-equipped he will fail to deal with real life situations. At present we have a workable system of class test, unit test, midterm etc, that help the student to prepare and deal with stressful situations. Geologists know that if a system of induced small earthquakes is generated it can avert a catastrophic earthquake in a fault region.

It is a proven fact that the best in a person surfaces in  a challenging situation. As the exams come closer we observe a marked change in the students. He becomes more focused; he summons all his mental and physical energy to focus on learning. His maximum learning takes place while preparing to face the exams. 

Removal of exams from an exam based system would harm the students more than do any good. It might help the Governments, the planners, and executers to relax  but it will render the system useless for the student. Who would no longer summon up his ability to stretch the horizon of his understanding and learning by preparing for the exam , moreover, he will not at all touch those topics which are important but he has no interest in.

The students from whom we have removed the exam stress might be happy today but, ‘dear all, what will happen tomorrow when the same students will face various entrance exams and fail?’ No one will be able to control their shattered harts; no one will be able to control the suicide rate.  Or this is how we plan to reduce the weaker youth population followed by Covid-19 deaths?

Just give it a thought.