Pointless exams turn kids into a crying mess

Forecasters say it’s going to be a piping hot month, which is great news for daydrinkers and beach-goers. But please spare a thought for the students. As the late Helen Lovejoy once said: ‘‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’’

Because, yesterday, our annual tradition of making students sit NCEA exams started. While the rest of us slow down for summer, the next month will be packed with stress for students sitting their exams.

Exam season is as predictable as can be. For those in the thick of it, every second conversation will start with: ‘‘I’m really stuffed for this exam’’. There’ll be the predictable moans about how miserable it all is. As the weeks wear on, the few unlucky enough to have late exams will become increasingly jealous. By the end of it, all they’ll be thinking is: ‘‘This sucks.’’

Anyone who’s ever sat exams knows they really do suck. It isn’t just the gruelling conditions that make exams bad. Exams also have a habit of systematically dismantling any genuine interest you once had in the subject.

To get through the season, students are fed some ridiculous ideas that their futures, their education, their whole damned lives, hang in the balance.

After a few years free of exams, I got back into them this year. I am sad to inform you it only gets worse. Universities, the in-and-out, fast-food equivalents of the education system, thrive off exams. They’re the cheapest, easiest, way to measure a student’s performance.

There is, in reality, little other value in an exam. They are quick and cheap assessments, that is it.

So, when I jumped into university this year, I was quite frankly disturbed to see that the stories we read so often about undergraduates buckling under exam stress are true.

I’ve talked to people, mostly students of ‘‘competitive courses’’, who I am hugely concerned for. They turn into obsessive, unhealthy, anxious creatures as rumours swirl about the minimum mark required to continue with their course.

My uncharitable self often laughed at students like them, geeks who chose to study boring courses. But when people you’ve known for years turn into hair-pulling, jargon-spewing, crying messes, it’s sad to watch. It’s sad, as well, because they are being caused unnecessary pain.

No-one is to blame for this except the universities themselves, and the education system that remains reliant on exams.

Those ivory-tower subjects, like law and medicine, seem to take great pleasure in having entire semesters or the year’s work examined in one exam. It’s crude and cruel.

It’s wrong to believe exams sift out the best practitioners. We know exams do not prepare students for anything other than their next year’s exams. I have never, not once outside of a school, been asked to write three essays in two hours without the ability to research the topic.

It’s also worrying that high schools and universities continue to punish people who, for whatever reason, don’t do well in exam conditions.

This can mean that, after a year of study, if a student has one bad exam they will need to go through the whole rigmarole again if they want to continue with that subject. It’s all down to luck. You might get lucky with the exam, good for you. Or, you might have rich parents, lucky you.

There’s now a lucrative tutoring industry, fuelled on exam angst. A suitably vapid-sounding company, called Crimson Consulting, is reported to be worth more than $200 million. It offers services such as NCEA tutoring and ‘‘med school consulting’’.

It is not uncommon for university students to have their parents fork out big bucks on companies like this. It seems the examination has become something of an art in itself, in which worried students look to an oracle or pay for one to help pass their tests. And then should they fail, those lucky enough to be able to afford to repeat the year will do so. Lucky for some.

So why do we do it? Surely these well-educated and well-paid educators know exams are pointless.

NCEA is set up in a way to minimise exam stress, with internals throughout the year. But some universities demand decent external exam results from prospective students.

I’m sorry if I sound overly pessimistic this week, but that’s probably because I am.

On Saturday, I will sit a 60 per cent examination for a course I am – or at least was – deeply passionate about. The truth is, I can’t wait for it to be over. I can’t wait to walk out of that exam room, and never have to pick up another one of these brain-numbing books again.

The sad thing is, before I started studying, I would have probably read these for fun.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had an education system that encouraged students to learn? One that, perhaps, taught them to solve problems rather than regurgitate quotes.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had an education system that encouraged students to learn . . . not regurgitate quotes.