Saturday, 25 February 2017

EXAMINATION IS NOT A TRUE TEST OF KNOWLEDGE



INTRODUCTION
Many scholars have argued whether examination is a true test of knowledge, personally I feel that examination is more of a feedback mechanism that confirms that a learner understands to a limit what a teacher or an instructor teaches; therefore passing an exam is a matter of getting prepared.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Examination: An exercise designed to examine progress or test qualification or knowledge
Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
Test: a procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something, especially before it is taken into widespread use.
ARE EXAMINATIONS ALWAYS A TRUE TEST OF ABILITY KNOWLEDGE?
No, because of test design.
The true term to ask for “validity” specifically “predictive validity”. Validity means how true a test is to the quality it is measured.
Let’s say I have a test to measure vocabulary. The scorer who scores high on vocabulary should have a higher vocabulary than one tested at mid-range or on the low-end.
“Predictive Validity” means how much does a test I take today present something in the future.
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Second, paper and pencil tests can never be as accurate as real life. I do not know of a single test that can measure how a person can deal with all the many challenges life holds (illness and death of people you care about, how well you manage money, etc.).
There have been plenty of examples of how even people from Harvard, Oxford, etc. cannot do what many more common people seem to do, such as being a good friend and family member, being on-time, understanding situations and other people, etc.
Because different teachers examine their papers differently. They tried to give more marks to the weak students and sometimes less marks to the best students. Knowledge of the teacher is also a factor

INTELLIGENCE CANNOT BE DEFINED BY EXAMS

We lose too many talented people by defining intelligence through exams that are wholly inadequate and constricting, says headmaster Peter Tait

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.” - Edward de Bono
Each year at this time, the pressure cranks up in the race for school and university places, as SATS and A-levels prepare to feed another raft of league tables. As these help determine our standing on the world stage, through the Programme for International Student Assessment our obsession with measuring children takes centre stage.
Confident in our system of public examinations, that is broadly designed to separate those more ‘intelligent’ from the less ‘intelligent’, we can feel content that we are filtering out our most able for higher education and all the opportunities that entails. Sounds simple enough, if it was really that easy.
The problem lies with the word intelligence. The common definition, that of possessing ‘a quickness of understanding and an ability to apply knowledge and skills to a high level’ – should give us pause to ask how well equipped our current examination system is to deliver?
Many ‘intelligent’ students, so identified by the data emanating from various intelligence tests (which incidentally too often reinforce teacher expectations), are frustrated by papers that trot out the same questions in a different garb. These allow for little or no original thought and even actively discourage creative thinking and intelligent responses.
Simply stated, measuring intelligence through examination is, inevitably, as limited as the examination itself. Whilst it might prove a reasonable sieve – perhaps even the best we can provide – it will not identify many of those we instinctively know to be intelligent.
There are simple reasons for this, apart from the failure of examinations to measure divergent thinking and creativity (due in part to the need to keep marking as objective and, therefore, as inflexible as possible to remove any room for subjective judgment).
The problem of measuring intelligence per se is that it is an inadequate guide to human capability, and that many of the ways we use to measure working intelligence are woefully inadequate. Surely those we should be seeking to identify and nurture are students with the capacity of effective or applied intelligence, those who can do something with what knowledge and skills they acquire?
Too many ‘intelligent’ children, often bored by conventional learning, slip through the net. Others just think differently to the straitjacket dictated by ‘one size fits all’ exams. For instance, the list of those luminaries with learning difficulties who found it difficult to express themselves in conventional examinations makes for sober reading.
This poses the question as to just how many are badly served by traditional examinations, despite all the assistance offered through extra time, reader-writers and the use of technology. We only have to reflect on some of our leading public figures who dropped out of school and have ended up in prominent positions in public life to know that the traditional system of assessment was not capable of measuring their particular abilities, their sense of purpose, work ethic and creativity.
There are also many ‘intelligent’ people, as measured by our schools, who have the historic indicators of intelligence, viz. a quickness of understanding and the ability to perform cognitively at a higher level but are painfully deficient in other aspects.
These people can lack initiative, the ability to ask difficult questions (and solve them), EQ, cooperative and communication skills and the organisational discipline crucial to make intelligence an active, rather than a passive, trait.
Because our perceived definition of intelligence is so closely linked in with an ability to be measured by exams, many intelligent people are disfranchised.
Our measure of who is intelligent depends more on giving expected and appropriate answers rather than showing any initiative or creative spark, this is probably the reason for the clutch of third class degrees accumulated by such luminaries as Michael Morpurgo, W. H. Auden and Carol Vorderman.
By measuring intelligence this way, we get some of the crop, but not all, and those that fall by the wayside can be the most important of all. Hence while neurosurgeons, judges and nanotechnologists emerge from the current system, one only has to look at the vast numbers of highly successful – and intelligent – people who failed to shine at school to see how random our measure is. As Winston Churchill aptly demonstrated, it is possible to win the Nobel Prize for Literature despite a mediocre school career and no tertiary qualifications.
Part of the problem may be how we value and reward intelligence, as identified through traditional testing. The word ’intelligent’ has a cache that other words, like ‘industrious’ do not. For instance, we richly reward those whose appointments are based on their academic qualifications; judges, diplomats, bankers and brokers, financiers, consultants, senior bureaucrats and the like. However, those people who make create, who tinker and take intellectual risks, are scantily rewarded in comparison.
e might well ask, are our schools guilty of promoting a passive form of intelligence, asking ‘what do you know’ rather than ‘what can you do’ simply because of the limitations of assessment? We might also pause to recognise that many ‘intelligent’ people may lack the very qualities we need from our leaders, be it emotional intelligence, wisdom or even common sense. Ability, talent, intelligence on their own are lumps of coal – they need setting alight to have any value.
Of course we need our most able to fly; we need an intelligentsia to keep challenging us and leading us forward. And they will probably still come from the traditional route until we widen our criteria and improve our tools for identifying talent, although when I read that 7 per cent of Oxford’s student population are receiving counselling along with  postgraduate students, I wonder how too much focus on academia can stunt emotional and social development. As a society, we benefit most from those with effective intelligence, who are able to channel their intelligence and use it, rather than merely parade it in the safety of institutions and selected professions.

EXAM RESULTS DON'T DETERMINE SUCCESS IN LIFE

The over-emphasis on exam results leads to a “pressure​ ​cooker environment” ​with students finding it difficult to cope, says Rod Bristow

The week directly after the half term break represents the peak of the annual exam season – an important time in many families’ lives as millions of students up and down the UK will be sitting their GCSE or A level exams.
But the recent debate about exam-induced stress reflects a legitimate concern for students, their families and for everyone involved in education.
With children of my own not long finished their A levels, I do understand how nerve-wracking this​ ​time can be. What's more, my job is to lead one of the UK's leading assessment organisations ​- ​Pearson is responsible for setting and marking around a quarter of all the GCSEs and A-levels​ ​taken each year in England and Wales.
Exams are important and they always will be. Good, demanding qualifications open doors to​ ​higher study and to fulfilling lives - so of course we back the government’s drive to raise​ ​standards and encourage success in them.
But, broader, deeper learning rather than exam results in isolation, should be the goal. That's why the government has already acted to address over-testing through removing the January assessment and tackling the culture of early entry to GCSEs.
Nevertheless, in recent years, exams have been given such a significance that they are in danger ​of undermining the very thing they are designed to encourage - a high quality broad based​ ​education that prepares people for life.
That over-emphasis leads to a “pressure​ ​cooker environment” ​with students finding it difficult to cope with the extraordinary levels of stress associated with taking exams. Sometimes parents​ also contribute to​ this stress​​,​ albeit with the best of intention.
Qualifications are a good proxy for the knowledge and skills that young people​ ​need. We should think of them as stepping-stones to a bright and successful future for those who​ ​achieve them. But they do not, and will never, completely define the sum total of what a good​ ​education ought to provide.
Nor are they a binary predictor that someone will succeed or fail in life; ambition and aspiration backed by hard work are better predictors of success in life than any single result on one exam on one day.
​I​ know this too, as an employer. Resilience, creativity, ethical values and an ability to work effectively with​ ​​others, are also vital outcomes of a rounded education; they enable success in life, not only the​ ​work place.
Of course exams are an important hurdle to get over. But, odd as i​t ​may sound, the best way to do that may be to see them for what they are; a good indication of your knowledge at one point in time, rather than the final word.

 CONCLUSION

Yes it is true that examination is not a true test of knowledge and for this reason we lose too many talented and intelligent people by defining intelligence through tests that are wholly inadequate and constricting. We need to look wider and encourage the entrepreneur, the inquisitive, the creative and the downright cussed in our schools to make the most of who we are and to bring out the richness and diversity of thought and ideas in our society.

 REFERENCES

Becker, G. S. (1993, June). The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior. The Journal of Political Economy, 101(3), 5.


Cultural Bias in Standardized Testing. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://culturalbiasinstandardizedtesting.weebly.com/what-is-cultural-bias-in-standardized-test.html


Curtis, C. (2013, January 30). How Psychometric Tests are Developing and Why You Can't Do it Yourself. Retrieved from onetest: http://www.onetest.com.au/home/blog/how-psychometric-tests-are-developed Michael Morpurgo, W. H. Auden and Carol Vorderman.

19 comments:

  1. Iquite agree with you totally. It cannot measure intuition, imagination and the ability of an individual to improve overtime. This is why Finland adopted a primary school education system deemphasizing or almost entirely illuminating examination and proved successful!

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