Education Without Exams

The question is this: would education without exams be better for students? Why should exams be taken? what does an exam do? Many people believe it is a way, which can help the students to improve their skills or just a mechanism that makes student progress for their successful future. For a student, exams are an inescapable part of his or her school time. Since there is the presence of an education system, exams can be used as a means of study assessment.

However, nowadays, more and more people have come to the decision that exams are not the only means of study assessment, they believe that education without exams would be better for the student. Most students cannot master technology, what have they got? What first needs to be done by students is to understand the aims of studying, is it to improve skills or pass exams. We do not need to be an educationist to answer this question, to improve a skill is the reason why most people study. Taking this idea into account, the exam has many disadvantages and deficiencies for the student.

Firstly, formal exams cannot appear to reflect a student's ability accurately; it can be unfair in several ways. For example, the whole career of a student depends upon what he or she does on a certain day and hours of an exam. if the student is ill, or if he or she has had some emotional trauma, these factors could have a negative effect on the student's exam results. Some students do not perform well under pressure and require a longer time to reach useful conclusions.

The final marks need to be decided by all items including assessment work, attendance, presentation, group work and examinations. All these can really reflect student's ability after their subject not only exam. If someone did not have a good revision or did some mistake in the examination, he or she definitely can fail him or her examination, but he or she still have done efforts in his or her study, so now the other item will be used to consider student's marks.

In different countries, there are different educational system, but they affirm having the same final process which is an examination. So the argument is coming from the final examination whether can identify student's efforts and abilities. Though formal exams have been used in the past, they should no longer be used as the only means of assessment because they can be an unfair indication of the student's overall ability, exams are important but to test in other ways as well are better for the students, which can be easy to test student's abilities.

WHAT DO WE WANT FROM EXAM ASSESSMENT?
Good assessment programs aim to provide a balanced, fair evaluation of each student. It can be achieved in two ways. First, the use of a variety of strategies and tasks which gives the students multiple opportunities, in varying contexts, to demonstrate what they know and can do. It also enables teachers to be confident in the accuracy of their judgments about each student.

Second, tasks must be fit for purpose. Let assume a subject has a number of goals (knowledge to learn, skills to acquire), each task should be appropriate to the specific goal or goals it is assessing. This means that a task assessing base knowledge will look different to one assessing creativity. Rather than abolishing exams, we should instead be asking what mix of assessment task is most appropriate for each subject.

EXAMS FOCUS ON THE BREADTH
In most disciplines, there are specific bodies of knowledge that students are expected to learn. Physics students might learn about thermodynamics, while history students might learn about cold war. Thus, exams enable us to accurately test student's breadth of understanding of these topics.

Critics of exams often instead promote deep, rich, and authentic assessment tasks. These are typically project-based tasks that draw on student's creativity and interest. For example, history students might be asked to choose and research historical character in depth. Business studies might be asked to design the pitch for a new business seeking venture capital.

These tasks develop several important higher order thinking skills, such as analysis and decision -making. However, they are not alternatives to exams. They do different things. And this is exactly what we want: multiple, different tasks to maximize student's opportunities to demonstrate what they know and can do.

Finally, we also want fit-for-purpose, where the breadth of knowledge is important, we want assessment tasks that target this breath. We want our future doctors to know of the entire human body. We want our future teachers to know a full repertoire of teaching and learning approaches.