To Test or Not to Test?

By Nyrika Nooreyezdan

Sitting down for tests and exams has become normal practice for almost every single student. We have all experienced the stress and anxiety that comes with cramming pages of information into our heads the night before and the frustration when you don’t know the answer to a particularly easy question. Should we be asking ourselves why stress and struggle is a universal norm when it comes to how we test intelligence and understanding in schools?

Students are people with multiple things happening in their life all at once. A bad grade may not be the product of one single factor. When your surroundings are constantly changing and you are dealing with many challenges that don’t all pertain to school, it is inevitable that these challenges may affect your performance. Since the grade that accounts for months of learning is determined on one day, it is inconvenient when that happens to be a day on which you cannot focus. How can this form of testing be considered an accurate estimation of understanding when factors other than intelligence have contributed to it? It could be considered much more effective and alleviate pressure on the student to give grades based on work done throughout the year such as projects or essays.

Tests like these tend to be a test of memory rather than understanding. When students feel it is vital to do well on a test they tend to focus less on learning and comprehending the topics but rather picking up as many important points as they can and trying to remember as much of the textbook as possible. This can also be attributed to the large amounts of information that the syllabus covers, which can be hard to remember all at once.

Having one final exam not only puts immense pressure on a child, but makes the whole experience of school much more tedious and tiring. The stress of tests and the idea that they are valued more than learning can lead to many children feeling discouraged in class or even letting their mind wander as they can always just learn from the textbook when they need to. Especially in the recent pandemic, when the lockdown has affected us all in different ways, focusing at length has become even more difficult. The burden of standardized tests can become all too much when faced with a global pandemic – or even when you have simply had a bad day and can’t face another bad grade.