Is The Exam Extinct?

South Australia, the state in which I teach seems to be gradually moving away from an examination-based model, to one where collaboration by means of group work is now the preferred method of external assessment.

This development has got me thinking over the recent months as to whether the times of the good old exam/test are in fact dead, or at the very least, dying, and has me asking...

Are Exams Still Relevent in Today's Educational Climate?

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The model of schooling in South Australia requires the high school completion certificate (SACE) to be undertaken over two years - i.e. Years 11 and 12. As per the final year in most schools, the culmination of the year's studies, was once, for many subjects, an exam. This was graded at 30% of the overall year's work. It was (is - where subjects still have an exam) assessed externally by moderators and/or teachers of the subject who do not know the student who sat the exam.

Over the past few years, the department tasked with providing the outlines for the basis of curriculum development has been restructuring the Year 12 courses, and I've just recently (mainly because my subject is the latest to have undergone this restructuring) noticed that the final Year 12 exams are, more often than not, being left out, in favour of some sort of collaborate project or task.

2018 marks, for the Information Technology subject I teach, the final Year 12 exam, making way, in 2019 and beyond, for a group project. While I find this a little sad, I think that I can also see the value in moving away from this model of assessment.

Let me say from the outset, I love exam preparation - assisting the students to really hone their understanding of concepts we studied during the year. I especially enjoyed seeing just how much their knowledge had grown from when something was first introduced at the beginning of the year, to where it was at the end of a year after they had been using it for eight or nine months (as an example, a student who was stumped by the idea of a noSQL database, such as MongoDB, when it was first introduced in February, being able to quickly and easily tell me all about it in September). There is something incredible in exam perparation - helping them to persist practice exam after practice exam, even despite poor results and failed attempts. Watching their confidence increase as their practice exam results improve over the weeks. Until finally, the big day arrives and they are standing in front of the room, a mess of nervous perspiration and jittering anxiousness, cramming that last morsel of knowledge into their brains, before...

They enter the room.

Only to emerge three hours later with a look of absolute joy or disparing horror on their faces (thanfully, the latter, in my experience has been few and far between). Either way, regardless of how their results turn out, it's a pretty stressful experience, which may be why the government is gradually moving away for this really strict and formal method of assessment.

It Is A Stressful Time

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Exam Stress is a thing. A documented thing. I remember, as a student in Year 12, and beyond, at university, getting a bit stressed out at exam time - wanting to do well does this to a person. I recall wondering if I had done enough: Did I read enough? Did I read the right thing? Have I taken enough notes? What if I studied the wrong topics? What if they ask different questions than I was taught? And the list goes on.

I also remember around exam time, being given a few tips from my teachers about how to cope - mainly it was simple: balance study with exercise and free time. Today, there are a trove of websites dedicated to the topic and Year 12 exam time even makes the news here. The are a pleathora of different channels of advice, ranging from similar to what I was told all those years ago to more nw age type adice about what to drink or eat just prior. Isn't there enough for a student to worry about in the lead up to an exam? Now they need to worry about how to tie their shoelaces if they wish to achieve a B grade or higher!?

This is part of the reason why, I believe that my state (I haven't looked at what other states or countries are doing in this regard) is shifting away from the end of year exam. The stress. I mean, let's face it - an exam as a measurement of student success is only really as good as one's recollection during a certain period of time. What happens to those students who freeze in an exam room and cannot answer the question? No matter how diligently they have been studying, they simply cannot recall what they need to in order to do well. Or what about the student who is very good at cramming, and therefore completes little to no work during the year and crams for a week prior to an exam, blitzes the answers and walks out with a better grade than the aforementioned dilligent students?

A word that comes to mind here is snapshot. The information recieved during an exam is a snapshot of where a student is at in a very specific point in time. It is not really an accurate record of their learning as a whole. What if they had a bad night's sleep? What if they experienced an incident of some sort on the way to school? What if they didn't have a good breakfast and they were hungry during the exam? There are many external factors that could skew the outcome of this assessment method.

We Don't Even Retain the Information

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Isn't true mastery of a subject acquired over time? If this is really true, how then can sitting for two to three hours recalling information be an accurate display of how well you have grasped a concept? You would need at least the year, practicing all that has been taught over and over to really grasp a concept or skill. What happens after the exam? Think back to your Year 12 exams and consider how much you really remember from them. I know I remember what it was like, I vaguely remember sitting in the room and taking the exam, but I only really retained maybe 20% of everything that I studied for in those final few weeks of Year 12. I know what DNA and RNA are, along with a few other useless tidbits of information, but the bulk of what I stuck in my brain way back in 1995 has long since perished.

Short term and working memory are to blame for this because over time, they erode. Short term memory is really only useful for between 5 to 9 bits of information at a time. Once information is in short term memory, it can eventually be transferred to long-term memory over a period of consolidation (that is, using it regularly until it cannot be forgotten). However, if information stored in short term memory is not used, it will be forgotten quickly. That is why you can never remember the phone number for the local pizza shop after you have called and ordered your pizza. This is an important process, because if you didn't lose information from here, you would never be able to learn new things Source.

Working memory is kind of like the intemediary - the memory that stores some of the more important short term ones, such as what one might study for in an exam. It is more stable than short term memory, but still loses information over a greater length of time (think up and sometimes over 20 years) Source.

My point here is that we are likely to lose the information crammed for an exam situation very quickly. Which presses the point of the effectiveness of exams as assessment tools. It would be interesting to have a group of students sit the exact same exam 12 months down the road after they had not studied the subject for this same amount of time and see how much information they would actually be able to remember.

Exams Are Not Reflective of a Work Environment

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Due to the very short term nature of exams (and tests), they are not overly reflective of a real-world work environment. When was the last time you heard of a boss giving their employees a test the day that a major project was due for completion? Or how often is a large scale development completed by one person? No, once they leave school, our students are unlikely to find themselves in a situation even remotely similar to that of an exam.

Employers want graduates who are proficient in the skills they claim to have, not the knowledge they posess. It's all well and good to know how a computer works and to be able to draw how the bus lines connect the differnet cards within, but if you cannot apply it to creating or developing something, then all of your knowledge is pretty impractical. Frustration is growing amongst employers. They are getting sick of students who cannot apply even the most basic soft skills after graduation, and exams do not really assist students in developing the skills employers are requiing. I don't think I ever recall being asked, in a job interview, how well I do in exams. Do you?

It is becoming clearly evident in educational circles that practice is more important than theory. Remember when you first got your drivers licence? You studied some theortical concepts so that you knew that rules of the road, but as soon as you could prove to the government that you knew these rules, you got out on the road and practiced. The same is becoming true of education, and exams tend to be a hinderance to this idea.

Conclusion

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So is the exam, after all these years, finally dead? Is it really helping our students achieve to their full potential, and if not, why then, are we still forcing them to undergo this seemingly outdated method of assessment.

Does it actually help them to learn, or is it just adding to the stress that most of the teenagers we teach already seem to be lugging around with them? It is becoming apparent that perhaps exams are not the best method to assess learning. As I mentioned at the start of this post, the climate is changing in South Australia. Quite a few subjects in the past few years have dropped the Year 12 examination, and as a consequence of this, Year 11 and 10 exams in the same subject stream have been obliterated too (this is happening at a school-based level, but why keep exams at lower levels if they are not practicing skills for a Year 12 exam?).

With the advent and continued adaption of inquiry-based learning, such as is common in the IB, it seems that exams are becoming more of a liability than an asset when it comes to helping students achieve well at school. I tend to agree with the new Digital Technologies curriculum that will be taught across my state from next year. Rarely are IT professionals working in a bubble - they are often collaborting and working in teams, so the new curriculum is going to be much more industry specific, and if that help my students gain meaningful and long-term employment, then that is a good thing.

Do you think exams are still relevant in a contemporary school setting? Does your school still have students sit exams, or have they done away with them completely? Do you have any other thoughts on the topic? I would love to hear from you, so please comment below.