by Rhys Rosser

Created on: July 04, 2008

The first part of my review is about exams and the scond is about coursework

Advantages of exams. An exam is always feared by a student and it often brings out the best. It teaches students to cope with pressure and often gives a sound judgment. The pupil can do a great deal of revising; this often means that they learn the work better than they knew it before they began revising. They also show the quality of the pupils' memory and their ability to memorize facts and data. An exam also shows what a pupil is capable of without a book to use as reference, all they have is their brain to use, nothing else.

Disadvantages of exams. I took my History GCSE a few years ago, and we did so much question spotting, I took the risk of believing it, and it came true. This meant that I could concentrate my revision on a specific topic and knew what I should revise. I also think that the exams mean that you can just revise and revise like mad for the exam, and just learn the things that you need to know. The introduction of revision guides into the mix also means that you can do the work without needing to use your own notes. I always find that you learn better with a typed guide, but this leads to more biased.

Coursework

Advantages of coursework, it shows that you can rescue some marks that you may have lost earlier in the exam. It also means that you can get help from a teacher, but risk losing marks. Although I find coursework very hard and it let me down in my exams, I still think that it is a lot easier to do a piece of coursework than to take a test.

Disadvantages, it means that you can cheat, you take your coursework home, get on the internet and search for the essay, print it off, and claim it's your own. You can also use your book when doing coursework, so there is no real personal aspect to it. You are also given a compulsive guide to the coursework, and you write drafts before you give in the final piece.

I'm going to introduce a third aspect now, assessed practical's these are used in the sciences instead of coursework. They are a practical with a script that you have to fill in, first there is a risk assessment, and then there is an experiment to complete, and then you must answer a set of questions on the experiment. I think these are a very good choice as they show a practical side to the exam, which is missing in the current system.

Thanks for reading this article

Learn more about this author, Rhys Rosser.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.