Are exams beneficial for students?

The two texts express contrasting views on the hotly debated issue of school exams. The first author considers the annual assessment of students’ performance as inadequate. Knowing that your only chance to prove your competence relies on a couple of questions that need to be answered within a suffocating time limit cannot but fill you with anxiety. To make matters worse, even when the students manage to cope with the stress it is doubtful whether they gain any academic benefit. All they do is switch off their critical thinking and employ their parrot fashion learning. When the exams are over they ‘delete’ all this array of incongruent information. Therefore, they end up with lots of pains and no gains! Conversely, the second text sees the exams as the only reliable means of school assessment. If the students were continually evaluated throughout the year they would be at the mercy of the bias of their teachers. If the professors are positively predisposed they will inflate the marks and if they have any sort of conflict with their pupils they could use the marks as a form of punishment. Moreover, the project work that has often been hailed as the creative alternative of barren exams may prove to be a hoax. More often than not it is other family members that do the work and the students undeservingly reap the rewards. While I agree that the exams entail counterproductive stress that may spoil the true meaning of education, I cannot overlook the fact that they are an objective and trustworthy method of evaluation. If the written tests accounted for a proportion of the pupils’ overall mark and the rest was completed with projects and class participation we could successfully combine the profits of these too seemingly contrasting methods. All in all, the examinations can contribute to an objective assessment of school performance as long as they are combined with elements of continuous assessment.