Do Final Exams Help or Hinder The Education Process?

Examinations are evaluative means for gauging students' achievements over a medium to long-term period. Examples of final exams are Ordinary, and Advanced level General Certificate of School Examinations (GCSE), degree or professional exams given at the end of a course. Although there are other methods of measuring achievement or attainment in learning, exams or tests are the easiest and quickest to administer.

Final exams are generally known as achievement or attainment tests. They are graded, and the higher scores attained are supposed to indicate higher degrees of achievement, while lower scores are generally indicative of low or poor attainment. But questions have recently been raised over the actual link between high exam scores and the actual competence of the persons tested. Both employers and educators at institutions of higher learning have raised concerns with regards to poor language proficiency among the new crop of young people joining professional courses or joining new careers after high school.

Complains abound of incompetence, or utter ineptitude among recent school leavers or college graduates when asked to demonstrate the skills which their paper qualifications show. A counter argument from the recently qualified is that their worth should not be measured only by their paper qualifications but by the actual skills they can demonstrate. The fundamental question now being asked is whether exams really serve a useful purpose or a mere waste of time.

Given that all stakeholders in education have for years attached importance to final exams as a valid measure of achievement in the relevant areas of training, both human and material resources have been heavily invested in them. Governments, parents, educators and the society know no other way of a publicly accepted mode of measuring achievement and success than exams. However, employers, trainers and insiders acknowledge that there are more practical ways of measuring competence than what most paper qualifications show.

Emphasis on paper qualifications has been criticised by none other than the educators themselves. They cite the fact that education has now been reduced to preparations for exams, with standardised tests given to younger children than ever before. Testing alone has become an important industry within education with hundreds of materials being churned out, ostensibly to prepare pupils to tackle exam questions.

As a result of this mad rush to churn out high scores, exams have seemingly become easier but with the heavy price of half-baked learning. Teachers and pupils have little time for what used to be called education for its own sake. Even school debates and dramatics have become choreographed farces with pupils memorising their lines and arguments. We are not training spontaneous thinkers but robots that would rather have readymade answers than be prepared for problem solving.

Thus, the desire for high scores in final exams have ensured that the education process has gone to the dogs and the sooner this is addressed the better for posterity.