Exam-oriented education does not grow a positive thinking in a individual,are you agree?Why?

Answer 1

Exam-oriented education grows knowledge and abilities, not positive thinking.

Answer 2

Depends on the exam types. Let's keep in mind the purpose of exams: (1) to evaluate how much a student has learned, (2) to evaluate how logical a student's thinking is, and (3) to evaluate how well the teacher has taught the material.

Multiple guess exams can do (1) and (3), but not (2). Open ended narrative exams can serve all three purposes. So why not make all exams narratives? Simple...time and money.

Many classes push 30-40 students nowadays. A single one-hour narrative exam takes about 15 minutes for a teacher to grade...assuming the handwriting is legible, which it often isn't. Thus, it would take a single teacher ten hours or more to grade one narrative exam from 40 students. And, in most classes, there is usually at least a mid-term and a final exam given. So we are talking about at least 20 hours of homework each term for the narrative exam teacher, not counting exam preparation time.

By contrast, the equivalent multiple guess exam takes about five minutes to go through and grade. This is still over three hours of teacher homework per exam for 40 students, but it is far more manageable and less intrusive into a teacher's home life. Thus, I give multiple guess exams realizing that I cannot evaluate logical thinking through their results.

For that, I assign one or more projects per student per term. Here the students are given goals to acheive according to their individual plans, using the skills taught in the class and the resources they can obtain. Here is where the logical thinking is challenged and, eventually, graded.

Answer 3

Yes I agree, exam-oriented education is insufficient and it leaves students with a "half-baked" education. Multiple choice examinations are a horrible way to examine students, since it doesn't require much thinking to select a correct answer from four plausible answers. Exam-oriented educations do not adequately develop a student's critical thinking for real-world situations which the will encounter in life, and also make it easier for the student to forget the subject material they have "learned".

Answer 4

Are these open-ended questions, or multiple choice? If you mean teaching to the test, I agree strongly. Unfortunetely, most schools have become more of "educational factories", cramming info down kid's throats, then places of personal growth, teaching children not just WHAT to think, but HOW to think.

Answer 5

I agree. Teaching to the test often means students are given meaningless facts to memorize and then spit back on tests. Critical thinking, creative thinking, and analytical thinking are all thrown away to get the "good scores".

Answer 6

Nope. Without exams, how do we know what we have learned?