Our toughest examinations are in life, not school

The B.C. Ministry of Education is in the process of introducing changes to highschool curriculum and assessment, starting with the new Grade 10 curriculum and numeracy assessment introduced in the summer of 2018.

New curricula for grades 11 and 12 will take effect in 2019, and a literacy assessment will be introduced in 2020.

However it all unfolds, there will be fewer traditional types of exams.

When any significant change is introduced into the delivery of public education in B.C., not everybody is happy about the changes.

From the parents of B.C. highschool students to the admissions office at the University of British Columbia, questions are being raised about the implications of replacing provincial exams for senior high-school students with new forms of assessments.

University and college admissions departments have relied heavily on provincial exam results to make admission decisions and to predict a student’s first-year success.

Teachers, who have long questioned the role of exams in reducing that which is taught to that which will be tested, are concerned — especially about the loss of an English 12 final exam.

A letter to the Ministry of Education from teachers of English points out that UBC admissions currently admits students based on their English 12 classroom grade and performance on the English 12 provincial exam. “As for the English 12 provincial exam, once it goes away, we will lose a lot of our ability to better understand English 12 course grades.”

Some parents worry about a loss of “rigour,” and so the debate about the value of formal exams will continue long after the fallout from the changes themselves has been measured.

All that said, there is an argument to be made that the most important “exams” we took and still take during our lives were not the controversial “paper and pencil” two-to-three-hour tests at the end of school terms.

As children, our serious “life” exams included learning to ride a two-wheeler like the other kids, learning to throw, kick and catch a ball, learning to swim across the pool so you’ll be allowed to go to the beach with friends and, for that matter, learning about how to choose the right friends and move away from the wrong ones.

As we grew, learning to play sports was important and the test we took every game and that other players understood was: “Have you developed the skills and fitness for this game as your team expects. Can you fulfil your responsibilities?”

As a wannabe musician, the exam was: “Don’t tell me what you can play — play it.”

Even later, as we began to consider the directions our lives might take and the opportunities we might pursue, exams were part of the planning.

Learning to drive a car and taking the test was a “biggie.”

For young high-performing student athletes looking for a lucrative NCAA scholarship at a major U.S. university, there is the SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In Canada, for anyone thinking about a career in jurisprudence, there is the extremely demanding LSAT, the Law School Admissions Test.

Then come job applications and the interview processes. All serious, life-changing exams. Thinking back, and having taken my high school and university education in the very examoriented New South Wales education system, of the many subjects I studied, the one with which I became most comfortable, and which was useful in the long run, was how to deal with exams.

Learning to handle exams of any kind was considered by my teachers as much a rite of passage to adulthood as a curricular end point. Knowing how not to be intimidated by exams, both academic and in life, has saved my bacon many times over.

In high school, we were taught to take a deep breath and read the exam paper carefully and twice. Interview questions and debate arguments were to be treated the same way.

The next step was to consider each question or proposition carefully and not to allow the pressure of the moment to answer a different question to the one the examiner or interviewer was actually asking, missing the real point.

None of any of that was easy, but we can console ourselves with the knowledge that even the best and brightest apparently had difficulty, not with the big “life” exams but with formal school exams.

Winston Churchill, he of the giant intellect who successfully steered an entire nation through a war, wrote about his own school exam experiences:

“I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”