Objectively, the exam itself is not bad. It is a most effective measure of a student’s knowledge, performance and ability. It checks the teaching and learning effect and keeps students working hard to get good marks in the later, more important exams. Scores are always considered indispensable to the assessment of a student’s academic performance. But in order to gain the highest score possible, both teachers and students choose to be drowned in a sea of exercises and exams, and most students are expected to do homework for several hours each day. In this way, people have made exam into a disaster. Our education is caught in a vicious circle.
There is good reason for abandoning exams. First, it is to answer the call of reducing students’ heavy burdens in their studies and return to them their happy childhood. For years we have been appealing for students to be freed from mountains of homework and extra classes, to no avail. Only through immersion in all kinds of exercises and classes can most of them get comparatively satisfying results in various exams. Therefore, the cancellation of exams is intended to remove a root cause of students’ toil and give them more play time. Second, exams, as a method of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. They may be a good means of testing memory, but they can tell nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teachers of all freedom. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise.
However, it is claimed that the major problem of our education lies in the exam-oriented system. What we need is not the cancellation a single exam, but a thorough educational reform.