Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Exams

These have had an unusually high profile in the media recently due to the difficulty in getting to them or providing a venue for them, owing to the weather. There have been complaints of a lack of flexibility among exam boards in making special arrangements or deferring sittings.

I have chatted to senior students and discovered something much more fundamental. In mastering a new syllabus there appears to be mismatch between teaching, textbooks, revision and the final questions which appear. The explanation is that the test is to see whether the student can apply the knowledge to real life situations.

This blog is proud to announce its disagreement with this concept, which it considers not only demotivating for students, but barmy anyway. An exam cannot by definition provide real life situations, which have to be experienced. The better way, which by co-incidence is the old way in use prior to the unleashing of politicians and academic crackpots into the education system of our country, is to teach the knowledge and when it has been fully and exhaustively acquired, application is learned at University or in working life.

Those engaged in further education or employment say without equivocation ‘give us candidates with a thorough grounding in the basic knowledge and leave the application to us’.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.