Exams suck. Period. I mean, what is the whole point of their existence? People are just sadistic and love to torture kids. A cruciatus curse would be more welcome. Exams take a toll on your health. You turn into sleep deprived and facebook-starved creatures. At the end of writing the paper, you are mentally exhausted, irrespective of whether the exam was good or bad. If it was good, you probably got tired writing…if it was bad, you probably got tired just sitting those two hours looking around and sharing we-are-doomed grins with your friends across the hall. And anyway after all this mind-numbing exercise, if you get bad marks, your parents kill you. If you get good marks, your friends do the honour. But the main question is, do these exams actually teach you anything?
The current education system is such that a person who knows the definition word to word is considered better than the person who actually understands the definition. Everyone studies for two days and after the exam everyone forgets everything. No one remembers what they had studied the last semester… but somehow everyone remembers the nursery rhymes they had learnt years back. Is it perhaps because, ironically, we are becoming dumber as we grow up? What was so different when we were kids?I think it was because learning was fun then. We used to actually love our teachers. I still go to meet my kindergarten teacher but i don’t even want to see the face of my high school teachers. May be we have also changed… our interests and focus has changed. But so have our professor’s attitude. Teaching has just become a money generating occupation. They teach disinterestedly, we study disinterestedly. And how cruel can they be!A sir comes and announces a test just out of the blue and doesn’t even tell the portion till 1 day before! It is like they feed on our fear, bloody dementors!I told my friend this and she said,’No, they are pedophiles… they just like screwing us!’
The whole point of conducting is examinations is to find out the cream of the class.They are meant to be the seive to highlight the best of the students.And what about the others? No one bothers about them like they are the worthless pebbles found while sifting.But can you gurantee that the currect design of the exams is good enough to find the best students? How does mugging up answers and puking them out on a paper decide the intelligence,i ask.If all you wanted was a good memory,a 1TB hard disk will do the job,why train the brains? How can a person prove his capability within 3 hours? Is knowing the date of the invention of a device more important than understanding its functionality?The kind of questions examiners come up with just to check how thoroughly the students have studied,fail to check the basic point of the necessity of exams-how well do the students know this subject? While the professors set the paper,they should try and make it such that it has an impact on the student’s thinking and not just his grades.Exams should test the smartness and not just the intelligence of the students.
These days all we do is read, by-heart, write. Assignments are always copied. Journals are completed sitting in front of the TV. At this rate the homo sapein sapien is going to evolve into xerox machine soon. The current education system needs to be changed. Why do people go abroad for higher studies,apart from getting a new experience? The other countries have a better system.They bother. They have better resources. Better facilities. If we Indians can copy everything from a logo to an entire movie,why dont we copy something that is actually worth copying? It doesnt take much money or resources to change the current examination and grading system. All we need is efforts. We need professors who are interested in teaching because they want to impart knowledge and not just because they need their salary cheque to buy a new air conditioner for their home. I have been fortunate enough to know professors who have gone out of their way and taught students even though they got paid peanuts. I have seen the efforts they put in. I have seen the efforts the students put in because of them. I have seen a last ranker getting better marks than the first ranker in a test devised by such professors to test the smartness. I have seen a last bencher solve a problem faster than the first bencher,at the same time secretly eating his tiffin. This has humbled me. Today i do not dare to right some one off as a dumb person.
I know the potential our country has.The current system is suffocating the talent. Our grading system and examination pattern depresses students to the point of committing a suicide. This saddens me.Either change the examination system or demolish it. Give us exams which are worth appearing for or dont give us exams at all. Only a few students manage to shine in this system. Our country has the capability of shining like the milky way but it still remains to be a mere dim constellation of just a few stars. This needs to be changed, and soon.
p.s-Here is an article about an effective grading system adopted in MIT
http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/204/winston.html
the devil's workshop 