In school, from kindergarten through college, teachers and schools revolve around tests. Usually, quizzes or exams are either general knowledge, like the SAT, or cumulative knowledge, like a history test at the end of the unit. This is often the required way to determine if a student learned anything from the unit, but it does not accurately measure if a student learned anything.
For a number of reasons, testing is inaccurate even if students gain knowledge. Often, memorizing various facts or formulas proves difficult for most teens, especially when there are so many more things on their minds. The point of school, specifically fields that students are not going to be going into in a professional sense, is to expand someone’s mind and exercise their learning and comprehension abilities. Learning is not reduced to the ability to memorize things that will not be relevant later on. Instead, tests should test a student’s ability to apply what they learned in an appropriate way.
For example, if tests are required, knowing every single date of major events in World War II is not why teachers teach it. Teachers teach history to know what happened, why it happened and, if applicable, how to stop it from happening again. Therefore, instead of multiple choice questions that are designed to trip up anyone who reads it, tests should be essays where students are able to prove what they know. Instead of a random guess of A, B, C or D, students should be able to work the questions in their favor so that teachers know what they taught well and what they did not teach so well. This system would allow both teachers and students alike to learn from their tests, providing more for teachers to base a review on for whatever their next exam is on.
If avoidable, teachers should not give tests at all. There are, of course, benefits to exams that cannot come from projects or take-home essays, such as knowing information without having outside resources to help. However, projects and take-home essays allow for those who have a hard time remembering dates and formulas to prove that they care about the content. Those who do have a strong writing voice or are working toward having one can read and edit as they desire. Those who do not care about the assignment can crank out their essay that is full of mistakes and hand it in. This gives the teacher a sense of what the students need help with, but it also allows them to see who cares and is applying themselves and who is not.
Teachers, as a general rule, do not like to see students fail. They look like a bad teacher when their students consistently fail, so there is no reason to make tests unnecessarily difficult and unpassable. If teachers were allowed to organize projects and essays instead of tests, the school environment would be healthier and less stressful for everyone involved.
Photo from Pixabay
