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by Johnny Knight

Created on: July 21, 2010   Last Updated: July 22, 2010

Many people’s intelligence and knowledge are judged upon by final exams, however whether it is a fair assessment is another matter. Going to University now depends on whether or not you have the exam results that you need to get in. Although many people who are very knowledgeable and intelligent sometimes do not perform in exams as well as expected by their teachers.

First of all I think that it is important that we have a deeper look into the meaning of the word ‘knowledge’. ‘Knowledge’ according to the Oxford dictionary means the ‘facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject’.

Knowledge can be obtained and kept in a person’s memory long term and short term. Many students have the ability to read a passage of text three or four times and then recite it word for word the next day. However if you ask them two days later they cannot. Therefore a lot of students can perform to a very high standard without fully understanding the concept in which they are being tested on. Knowledge of a subject is not the ability to recite hundreds of words that mean nothing to the student but to understand the theory of the subject so it can be applied using the knowledge and understanding of the student to modern day examples.  

Although this short-term memory technique works for many exams, it sometimes cannot be used. For example, for subjects like maths, you have to be able to understand the theory behind it to be able to apply it to the question. In order to achieve a high exam grade in these exams you have to understand the concept and ideas of the subject to get a good mark, therefore long-term memory is essential.

Having a good short-term memory however is a very useful skill that can be used very effectively. Going back to the question, we need to discuss the idea of a fair assessment of a student’s knowledge. An exam is used to distinguish which students have the best knowledge and understanding of the subject. The exam itself is made to be fair, there is no copying or notes involved (in most exams there are no notes) and therefore is up to the individuals knowledge to achieve a high exam result. However, there are flaws in the system; people do manage to cheat (having witnessed it with my own eyes). Therefore the people who have no understanding of the subject achieve high results, which they do not truly deserve. There are different exams comprised every year and therefore contain different questions, although exam boards try and make the difficulty of the questions the same sometimes one year the exam will be harder or easier therefore making it a invalid test of knowledge.

Performance on the day is another major factor that contributes to the final grade that the student obtains. We have all been there, sitting at the back of a plain room writing furiously and then suddenly we have a mind blank. We have spent all of the term revising and although we know that we know the answer we simply cannot remember. It’s the dreaded exam mind blank. It happens to the best students! Sometimes exams go well and we remember everything that we have revised but other times we cannot concentrate. The human mind is always constantly thinking and in our modern lives there are so many distractions, which affect our trails of thought. In an exam room there could be someone using a pen that distracts you and therefore you do not perform as well as you could.  Maybe you are trying to remember whether you locked the back door, there are always distractions. Most exams are taken in large rooms with many other people, if somehow there could be less .

Some people are really not exam material. From a very young age exams become a repetitive thing. However some people deal with exam stress more effectively than others and therefore perform better in the actual exam, some people who actually have more knowledge and understanding of the subject do badly because they are nervous. This is the real problem, however it is very difficult to measure students knowledge without an exam. 

Knowledge is quite a general word, therefore I want to talk about a slightly different type of knowledge that is not tested but is in my view and I know in many other peoples view as important or even more important. You might have never heard of interpersonal intelligence, it’s basically the understanding of other people. It is useful because we can predict how the other person will act and therefore communicate effectively with them. Another type of knowledge and skill is intrapersonal intelligence; this is the idea of being able to look into our own thought process, it's useful because then we can make the right decision. This type of knowledge is not really tested in the final exams and therefore, I feel that final exams are not very efficient at testing people’s knowledge. Also, a skill that in a way grows with knowledge is people's social ability, you need to have people skills to succeed in life.

Final exams are very compact. They cram a whole years of learning into a one or two hour spot. It seems rather a crude way of testing a student’s knowledge and understanding. Not even all aspects of the information that you might have studied are put into the exam. I feel that the system is corrupt to some extent and therefore not giving a fair valid evaluation of the student’s knowledge. There are too many variables that are not taken into account. We need a better system that will test knowledge and areas of knowledge that are not tested in a more efficient and clever manner that will separate the good students from the bad students.

I feel that final exams give a small insight into the student’s knowledge but not at all to the degree that should be achieved. Drastic action is needed. 

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