Why exams aren’t a true
representation of intelligence.
“Everybody is a
genius but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend
it’s whole life believing its stupid.” Albert Einstein.
For years of our lives we discuss the topics set by teachers
in groups and learn through interaction, then at the end of the academic year
we are forced to sit in silence and recite everything we’ve learnt that was
crammed into a five minute revision session the night before. Exams are a test
of memory which vary between ages and people. Revision techniques and teaching
methods are not always applicable to everyone and this can affect how the
subject is understood or approached by students leading them to believe they
are not capable. An example of this is my current PE teacher who doesn’t
believe in copying from texts books which I find helpful when I don’t
understand something.
Many people struggle with nerves and the pressure put on
during the exam period, stress levels burst through the roof as we are told we
HAVE to meet target minimum grades of B’s, A’s and A*’s. The pressure of this
alone can put off students, giving them a sense of impending doom. This
shouldn’t be a true representation of intelligence, as many students struggle
understanding the questions in the paper, because they are worded so complexly
it causes confusion and losing marks.
The time period set for exams are often problematic for
students when trying to gain over 100 marks in an hour, theoretically if we had
an extra 5 minutes before an exam to revise could we get an A instead of a B,
it could even be the difference between a pass and a fail. Its luck depending
on the questions you receive and the topics you understand, exams don’t measure
intelligence because you could explain your answer as fully as possible but
miss one word meaning you don’t get any marks. The amount of revision we have
to do means we have no social life and as the saying goes ‘youth is wasted on
the young’ this implies that we have the capability to do things like
travelling but no time or money to. The amount of information cannot possibly
be retained or is even useful for working life; from personal experience I can
tell you that I have never used Pythagoras’ Theorem or Hicks Law making it seem
very useless.
To conclude, we feel that exams should be scrapped and
education should be optional post 16.
- We used personal experiences in our speech "from personal experience I can tell you...", by using this it makes our speech more persuasive to the audience as it is more believable as we are able to back up our initial point with a valid reason.
- We included alliterations: "always applicable", "students struggle" and "techniques and teaching".
- We included quotes and phrases, "youth is wasted on the young" "Everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend it’s whole life believing its stupid.”
- We also included a variation of sentence types and a variation of adjectives.
