» Dani: on the pointlessness of exams
Dani celebrates exam results season by asking what Pythagoras has to do with real life
My sister received her exam results a few weeks ago, passing with colours flying everywhere. Which is great – but every year, when results are handed out, the news is full of stories about how some people sitting in some office somewhere are claiming that exams have become far too easy.
Is it not possible for one minute that so many more people are passing with higher grades because the people taking the exams are actually more intelligent? From my own experience, and from watching others, I can say hands down that exams are not easy. And most of the exams you will take throughout your education won’t all be on one subject either – you will have a number of things to remember on a number of subjects, which only adds to the stress of it all.
If all the pupils were getting lower results, you can guarantee people would say
it was because the education system was failing. It really seems that we can’t win. And, to top it all off, once students leave university the chances are (according to the press) that they won’t be able to get a job.
“Kids leave school with an intricate knowledge of the periodic table but unable to write a cheque”
Even if exams have become easier over the past 20 years, I’m sure each pupil now has to sit more of them – especially as people are staying in education for longer. And take the multiple choice GCSE papers which some consider to be particularly easy to pass – these exams are on subjects that a bunch of 15 and 16-year-olds really have very little interest in, or use for in later life. Kids might leave secondary school with an intricate knowledge of the periodic table, but they often lack such basic life skills as how to write a cheque out or pay a bill or put together a CV.
It’s ridiculous: these exams assume that all 16-years-olds are completely the same, will have enough of an interest in dull subjects to try their hardest (although most do, making the revision period a nightmare time), and will already know what it is they want to be doing all the way up until they are 50.
You bet there is a fault in the education system – I just don’t think it is with the exams. There are a number of important things a person needs to know before setting out into the big wide world, but I’m pretty sure that the exact dimensions of different types of triangle isn’t one of them.
