This is at the forefront of my mind right now because I am currently on Easter holiday, as they call our month-long spring break here, and exams start once the break is over. So it's revision1 time now. In the U.S., we don't have exams at pre-college level. In England, however, the entire education system is built on exams. When I started A Levels2, with no idea of what I was getting into, I had never taken an exam in my life, nor had I even taken a real test in about five years because I was a distance learner with an online school. At A Level, exams are marked by external examiners who have no association with the institution at which you are studying, and therefore have not involved in teaching you at all. The goal is for grading to be as objective as possible. This is a major culture shock in comparison to my experience of subjective American teaching, where, to some extent, teachers know their students; they know their learning history, their personalities, their parents, their struggles, and their strengths and weaknesses. Imagine going from that to having an absent stranger mark something that's worth 60% of your overall grade. At university level, our exams are marked by our lecturers, but they are still anonymised.
The big deal about English exams is that if you fail them, you will fail your year. Then you would have to go back to square one and start over. There are no opportunities for extra-credit work to pull up your grades. I found the experience of having to learn to take exams an interesting and stimulating challenge. As a humanities student, the major skill that I've gained from exams is being able to come up with an analytical argument or a reading of a text under pressure in fifteen minutes or less. It has helped build my intellectual confidence and I work a lot faster now because of it. However, there isn't much allowance here for different learning styles. Many people who cannot succeed at exams for any number of reasons cannot pass their A Levels and have to find alternative courses, such as BTECs3, or reconsider their place in academia entirely. Alternative education hasn't caught on here.
There is one aspect of exam, in particular, that has affected my daily learning experience both during A Levels and now at university (though this is based on a humanities, primarily literary studies, perspective). It is that students tend to study for the exams. There isn't a lot of coursework that we do throughout the term that contributes to our final mark. We have a couple of essays per module, and in my current year only one essay per module counts toward our module mark. Because we focus each essay and exam on one or two texts that we choose from the syllabus, many students have no motivation to study the texts that they are not writing on. This results in a lack of participation in seminar and even a lack of attendance. Some students choose to cram-study during the revision period, rather than put any effort in at all during term-time. And because, for my course, exams are all at the end of the year (May), that means that students are even less likely to be engaged during seminars that run, say, from October to December.
The issue that I wish I could tackle is the timing of exams. The easiest way to solve a lot of the problems of my undergraduate English literature exams is to have the exams take place right at the end of each module. Eliminating the end-of-year revision and exam period would force, or 'encourage', student to participate and be highly engaged during seminars. They would ask their questions during class, rather than saving them to ask lecturers privately, usually via e-mail, during Easter holidays. It would promote group studying, rather than sending everyone home for a month to revise in isolation. And, finally, it reduce a huge amount of stress that results from exams looming in the future throughout the whole year, blown far out of proportion, until they morph into a big, ominous mass of impending dates that will surely result in inevitable doom.
I'll finish there. I seriously need to get back to revising.
The big deal about English exams is that if you fail them, you will fail your year. Then you would have to go back to square one and start over. There are no opportunities for extra-credit work to pull up your grades. I found the experience of having to learn to take exams an interesting and stimulating challenge. As a humanities student, the major skill that I've gained from exams is being able to come up with an analytical argument or a reading of a text under pressure in fifteen minutes or less. It has helped build my intellectual confidence and I work a lot faster now because of it. However, there isn't much allowance here for different learning styles. Many people who cannot succeed at exams for any number of reasons cannot pass their A Levels and have to find alternative courses, such as BTECs3, or reconsider their place in academia entirely. Alternative education hasn't caught on here.
There is one aspect of exam, in particular, that has affected my daily learning experience both during A Levels and now at university (though this is based on a humanities, primarily literary studies, perspective). It is that students tend to study for the exams. There isn't a lot of coursework that we do throughout the term that contributes to our final mark. We have a couple of essays per module, and in my current year only one essay per module counts toward our module mark. Because we focus each essay and exam on one or two texts that we choose from the syllabus, many students have no motivation to study the texts that they are not writing on. This results in a lack of participation in seminar and even a lack of attendance. Some students choose to cram-study during the revision period, rather than put any effort in at all during term-time. And because, for my course, exams are all at the end of the year (May), that means that students are even less likely to be engaged during seminars that run, say, from October to December.
The issue that I wish I could tackle is the timing of exams. The easiest way to solve a lot of the problems of my undergraduate English literature exams is to have the exams take place right at the end of each module. Eliminating the end-of-year revision and exam period would force, or 'encourage', student to participate and be highly engaged during seminars. They would ask their questions during class, rather than saving them to ask lecturers privately, usually via e-mail, during Easter holidays. It would promote group studying, rather than sending everyone home for a month to revise in isolation. And, finally, it reduce a huge amount of stress that results from exams looming in the future throughout the whole year, blown far out of proportion, until they morph into a big, ominous mass of impending dates that will surely result in inevitable doom.
I'll finish there. I seriously need to get back to revising.
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