Rethinking the value of final exams
Reformers want to do away with them; critics say shielding kids from stress is wrong
E xam season — that annual academic ritual of lastditch, high-stress cramming — is upon the students of Canada. But as two major universities, York and Toronto, head into finals after prolonged teacher strikes, some students are fretting about a different sort of stress: the possible cancellation of this year’s big tests. That would mean no risk of choking on exam day, but also no chance to bump up final grades. Either way, it would put any students spared final tests at the leading edge of a movement on campuses, at high schools, even elementary schools: the decline of the exam.
For all the energy and attention they demand, educators are pushing to marginalize exams. These are not just dying out as an irrelevance, like the slide rule. They are being killed off as an affront to human nature and dignity, like the strap.
“We are in the midst of an educational revolution,” said Stuart Shanker, distinguished research professor of philosophy and psychology at York University and a leading figure in educational reform. “Everything’s going to change now.”
Alberta is a leader in this, deciding this month to give less weight to standardized highschool exams and more to daily work. Ontario is following, with a pilot project for a new model of evaluation informed by the view high-stress exams give a false picture of a student’s abilities.
In the United States, Florida just eliminated a major Grade 11 exam on the grounds there are “too many tests.” Colorado, Washington, Arizona and others are making similar moves. New York’s mayor wants to relax admissions standards at specialist public high schools, mainly to take the weight off a major exam that favours students who can afford to hire tutors.
And U.S. law schools are looking at ways to reduce increasing failures in bar admissions exams, in some cases letting students skip them entirely.
Driven by recent scientific insights into stress, cognition, memory and attention, the target of this revolution — the statue to be symbolically toppled — is not the pop quiz or the end-of-chapter recap test, but the high-stakes, all-or-nothing, pencil-chewing, hair-twisting final exam.
Even China is trying to lessen student workloads. In India, which like other Asian countries still generally hews to the model of do-or-die exams and where parents were photographed last month scaling the wall of a school to slip cheat sheets to their children taking an exam inside, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently told high-school students these exams “are not the end of your life.”
But there’s the rub: they seem that way. “It is difficult to communicate the pain, suffering and misery suffered by high-test-anxious subjects before, during, and after major evaluative experiences,” wrote Moshe Zeidner, an education professor at University of Haifa, Israel, in his 1998 book Test Anxiety.
It was part of a surge of interest in testing as enrolment rose and schools were revamped under progressive ideologies. But where teachers and parents might once have emphasized preparation to overcome exam anxiety, now the goal is to alleviate distress as much as possible by cutting exams or downplaying their importance.
Critics decry this apparent Montessorification of higher education. They argue ditching exams simply coddles immature students who would benefit from a bit of temporary pressure to prepare for the real world.
“Sometimes I wonder who they are trying to make it easier on,” said Doretta Wilson, executive director of the Society for Quality Education, an advocacy group that opposes the “fads” of “progressivism” in teaching strategies.
She said the anti-exam ideology grew out of the “self-esteem” movement in education, in which failure is to be avoided at all costs, even when it is deserved.
“We are now reaping the consequences of that emphasis,” she said. “We’ve not trained our kids to deal with that kind of stress ... We’ve done a generation of kids a disservice by giving them so much self-esteem that they can’t deal with failure.”
Once a place for elite competition among the best and brightest, university education now resembles inner- tube water polo, where the emphasis is on participation and everybody gets a medal, said Ken Coates, Canada research chair in regional innovation at the University of Saskatchewan and co-author of Campus Confidential, which criticizes declining university standards. “Employers used to know that if you graduated university, then you had achieved certain things,” he said. Allowing students to skip exams is “taking away a key element of a university degree. People have forgotten at great detriment that the writing of a test is a valuable skill in its own right.”
There is evidence, however, the slow death of exams is not simply a sympathetic response to quivering students, but to new science around cognition, which suggests the traditional highstress, all-or-nothing final exam may not be an accurate measure of learning.
“There is a time and a place for diagnostics, but a sole reliance on them does not seem wise to me,” said Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist who heads the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago and researches cognitive performance under pressure.
Stressful exams “rob us of our limited ability to pay attention to what we need to,” she said. It is comparable to why driving and talking on a cellphone is so bad; the worries associated with performance under pressure “soak up the resources that we could be using to focus on a test.”
“Ironically, those most likely to fail in demanding situations are those who, in the absence of pressure, have the greatest capacity for success,” Beilock said in a research paper, Math Performance In Stressful Situations, published in 2008 in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Shanker believes students should still be tested, but must also learn to “effectively and efficiently cope with stress and then recover from that effort. If the recovery is constrained, then the kid can’t think well, can’t write well,” he said.
The proper response to this problem is not to tell students to suck it up, but to rethink how exams are given in the first place. Or whether to give them at all.