Exams

Forgive me for writing about exams, but this has been my life for the past couple of months and I thought I would share a few things that really bug me about them.

First of all, a majority of exams test your memory, not your knowledge. Revising is about how much you can cram into your head before the exam the next day, and most of it you forget as soon as you leave the exam room. In addition to this, most exams are only around one and a half hours long and so all the work you have been doing throughout the whole year is based on these 90 minutes. This has resulted in students picking subjects that have easy exams, in which you need a lower percentage to gain an A, rather than subjects they are interested in. 

Secondly, there is no time for students to really enjoy their subjects. We can’t stray off the course to look at something we are interested in because we don't have time. The syllabus dictates what we are to learn and nothing else matters because this is what will get us the higher grades. In a world where jobs are hard to find and even harder to keep, even with university degrees, we’re taught that grades matter. It is no longer acceptable to pass, we have to get As and A*s if we want to be “successful”. 

There were 34,000 calls to ChildLine regarding exam stress in 2013-2014 which is a 200% increase from 2012-2013. This shows the increasing amount of pressure put onto students. As if this isn’t enough, some of my friends’ parents put additional pressure on their children, telling them that they need to get high grades. All of this extra pressure can damage students’ mental health.

Ultimately, what I am trying to say is that schools no longer teach us to think. We’re given set structures to write our essays and we’re also given evaluations to write, so we don’t have to think about them ourselves, as this would get us the “top mark”. All students want to succeed in their exams, even if they don’t want to admit it, so wouldn’t it be foolish of us not to use what we are given?