The Negative Impact of End of Year Exams- Nayantara Kapoor, The Tiffin Girls’ School

When May comes around, a heavy, resounding sigh echoes across the UK. Exam season. Hundreds of students file in silence into gyms and halls in their schools, to sit in rows and columns of desks to silently churn out formulaic answers to check boxes on the mark schemes for the questions in the thick booklets they are filling in. 

Half of every school vanishes into months of study leave and exam prep, and any real teaching is abandoned for revision lessons and lessons coaching on exam technique. Real learning and understanding, or appreciation for subjects is neglected, to the chagrin of teachers, and to the disadvantage of the students. Exams are all marked by a stringent set of requirements that rely upon set-by-set dictation of points that must be argued. This leads to less true exploration of the subject and the field, and more rote memorisation of mark schemes and examiners reports. 

Students spiral into cycles of unwanted stress, sleeplessness, unbalanced diets or neglecting of healthy diets, fatigue and severe blows to self confidence. Exams like these teach young people to measure their worth according to their marks and their grades, and with the comparative grading systems, teaches them to pit themselves against each other.

Of course, judging someone’s worth or intelligence off a set of grades on a piece of paper is ludicrous, as is the idea that one can judge how well someone has learned something or understood it simply from one exam paper. And not everyone responds well or performs well on exam papers. People learn in different ways, yet the exams only cater to one particular, stringent type of learning that does not permit creativity or allow for passion projects. It teaches the youth that learning is only for a particular result or aim, never just for the sake of knowing or interest. Yet this is the kind of mental state that we are encouraging in our society, with our emphasis on exams . 

The education field has evolved dramatically over time, and yet in this one area, we are still stuck in the past. We need to reform the system, and find a new way to teach and assess progress, because the current method does not work.