Tests have always been my enemy for as long as I have been a student.
Whether you’re spending your time unproductively worrying about the grades of other students in the room, how much time you have left, or the anxiety and frustration that filled your mind when you couldn’t answer the first few questions, has always been an obstacle for them. myself.
After entering university, things went downhill.
Sitting in a huge lecture hall filled with about 100 students at 8 a.m. on a Saturday and completing a 45-question exam in two hours is the most daunting way to prove your knowledge of a subject. is.
I never had the privilege of growing up in that kind of environment, and I think many other students can relate. important aspects The influence of exam culture tends to prevent students from presenting a thorough understanding of the subject matter.
A nearly universal experience for all types of students is test anxiety.
Luke Aliga, a third-year technical writing major at the University of Minnesota, said test anxiety can lead to feelings of doubt.
“I get nervous during exams, especially when there’s a time limit. There’s not a lot of room to think things through, you just have to put it on paper,” Aliga said. “The feeling of being rushed is itself a form of restraint.”
First-year student Hannah Ahimou said exam results are what causes the most anxiety.
“Usually there are four options, so it’s like, ‘Okay, I have a one-in-four chance of getting this right,'” Ahimou said. “It’s frustrating when exams come back and the answers are too close together.”
In-class exams are not empathetic to the personal or academic challenges students face in proving their knowledge fairly.
In addition, there is a lack of opportunities for students to creatively apply their knowledge, which is a factor that sets many students apart from success.
Miles Kao, a first-year kinesiology student, prefers writing papers to taking exams.
“I think exams have a role when it comes to demonstrating retention of information, but I feel like papers give students real time to demonstrate real-world application,” Cao says.
Writing reports allows students to dig deeper into the content and discover ideas that weren’t initially in their minds. Essays also allow students to share how they independently interpret information.
“You can express your creativity and add a little more of your own personality to it,” Arriga says. “Exams, on the other hand, are more like rote memorization. There’s not really a lot of room to study freely and refer back to that information and remember, ‘Oh, what did I learn for this?’ ”
Sylvia Belka, a third-year aerospace engineering student, said she prefers other forms of assessment, such as take-home exams and projects.
“We had a group project leading up to the finals. I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it made the class a lot less anxious,” Belka said. “I felt that it was enough effort to get a decent grade, but in exam classes I feel like it’s a lot of work to get a satisfactory grade.”
Another aspect of exam culture is how students study for exams. Most students tend to memorize their semester’s worth of knowledge as quickly as possible by exam day.
“It’s just testing your memory,” Arriga said. “How does that actually show how much you’ve learned? Because once you memorize it, you go to the next exam and then you have to memorize other information.”
Many students have more priorities than one exam and try to rely on the following: crammingafter all, a deeper and longer-term understanding of the content is not achieved.
“When you use your own resources to answer a question, it applies more to real-world situations, because most people look up something or ask someone for an answer, rather than just trying to remember.” Because it becomes,” Arriga said.
Exams usually make up a large part of a student’s grade in class, putting pressure on students to pass.
“They are [professors] You then have to post your average exam score and rank yourself compared to your other classmates,” Belka said. “Am I above average or below average? I have to find the balance of not having that awful internal monologue after doing worse than my class on an exam. ”
When it comes to assessing student knowledge, exams and the surrounding culture do many students no justice.
Education is not a panacea. It is in an educator’s best interest to be aware of the different ways students retain and utilize information. When students have a choice, there is less pressure and anxiety about having their knowledge evaluated.
