Please Regurgitate Everything You Learned In Two Hours

[Formalhaut]

I just had an exam today and I feel mentally exhausted by it. I really don't understand them. How can forcing people to write everything they learned on a particular subject in two hours possibly going to be helpful in day-to-day work? In the workplace, will I be forced to be sat down with no visual aids or notes and write an essay in limited time? I never understood the concept.

And I have such sucky memory as well. I could remember all the pertinent parts, but a few times I just couldn't remember who said that. It's very frustrating. But it's over now, and I think I did pretty well. We'll see.

What do you guys remember about exams? From School or from University, did you enjoy taking them and preferred them to coursework or other assessments, or did you, like me, loathe them?

[noxious.sunshine]

It depends on the subject.

If it's math or most sciences, forget about it.

English and Spanish were my top classes, and History I wasn't too bad at.

[Freya]

Oh I thought you were saying I needed to TIL you. Cause TIL about Pentaquarks and how they were just discovered and most quarks are color coded and Quarks and AntiQuarks make up every nuetron and proton and yeah.

But for tests? I get test anxiety. I freeze up when asked questions. I may have studied and I may know it but I worry so much that I second guess myself a lot and I miss answer. So I hated tests. I'd do great on non tested work and bad on tested work.

[Ayen]

I never understood it either, and I'm assuming the reasons you mentioned is why Mom didn't have any exams in my home schooling. I still to this day have never taken a single exam on anything, and I can see I'm not missing much.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

It is important to "test" students to know if they are understanding what you are teaching them or if you'll just further leave them in the dust when you move on. The traditional test is really flawed though, and it really only tests someone's ability to be a good test taker. I was always a good test taker with no anxiety, so I always did well on tests.

This is why I preferred doing projects and papers to test for the knowledge of my students. It was more fun, students were more invested in it, and it really told me more about their thinking than what a traditional test would. I had this one assignment I stole/modified from one of my professors that she called the "bajillion ways to do a project" thing. Basically, it gave the student the freedom to do whatever they wanted to show me what they knew really. There were some criteria I put in that they had to meet to get a good grade, but otherwise they could show me their knowledge however they wanted. They could write a story, write a poem, make a video, draw a comic, write a song, etc etc. We then had to present our thing to each other. It also doubled as a good means to see what each of my students were interested in, what their talents were outside of my specific subject area, and it just helped me better understand their thought processes.

[Pumpkin]

I've always been good enough at them (although I've been out of school for a few years now so who knows when I go back ) but I agree that they're flawed. I think the best ones are the ones that give you open-ended questions and make you reflect on things and put them in your own words. It's good for seeing who learned and understood what.

Because I've known some people who knew and understood all of the material but had trouble on tests, and I knew some people who literally just had good memory for writing answers word for word as they read them, but none of it really registered and they didn't understand it. So in that case it shows that person A knew less than person B, when really the opposite was true.

I in general think that the school system is a bit flawed because people have different strengths and weaknesses and measuring them all by the same standard is just setting a lot of people up for failure. In an ideal world I would like schools where they can teach in different ways to help the students actually learn. Like some students are more hands on and won't learn well reading text from a book, but if you teach them in a more hands on environment, they'll understand it and broaden their knowledge, which is kind of the point. But I'm just rambling at this point.

Basically while I personally have never had any trouble on tests or exams or projects or anything other than doing my homework on time, I think that they aren't the most accurate way to judge how much someone has learned. Projects, open-ended questions, discussions, I think those thinks work better

[Crop]

While school obviously taught me the basics (reading, writing, basic maths) and sparked my interest in certain subjects such as History and English Literature, I can say with total honesty that I have learned far more in the 6 years since I left education than I did for the 16 that I was in it.

Oh and although I got fairly good grades, I can remember nothing from my exams.

[Karifean]

I hate those kinds of tests. Tests that just randomly test knowledge across the board, knowledge you probably won't ever need (or can just look up if you do need it at some point). They're always such a pain. It should be enough to just test if the students understood the foundations and applicances of the material in question.

Although it's hard to argue that these tests are in fact pointless, because they do make you expose yourself to all the material to a high enough degree so that if they do come up at some point in the future, you at least remember something about it in the back of your head.

I still don't care for them.

[Dat Matt]

As part of a module in University for accountancy I had a Law class. I had no aptitude for it whatsoever as I am good with numbers, not remembering cases. I failed that class 3 separate times with scores around 30-35% with 40% being the bare minimum.

I passed it on the fourth and final try with a score of 43%. Never touched the subject again and I remember literally nothing from the course. I scored high 70% for other modules that included numbers but this one class stumped me.


I hate exams for this reason. I was generally pretty good in the classes and seminars, but I can't do exams for the life of me.

[FFNut]

My issue always was I never applied myself, when I did I did ok but I needed to want it which I just never did. To many other things I could be doing that to take time to study was a waste of time.

[Fynn]

This is why I am grateful for the MA course I decided to take. Translations. That's just what it was. At the end of the year, our exams consisted of texts from the various fields we studied and we just had to translate them. We had dictionaries, we could use our own glossaries - it was just like how you would do a regular translation (minus access to the Internet, which is a bigger hurdle than it seems), which seems like a perfect test for the skills we gained over the two years.

[Psychotic]

I forgot everything to do with them, even the taking of them.

[Old Manus]

I always preferred exams to the perpetual boredom of continual assessment. I'd rather write reams of paper on something I don't care about for a few hours one time a year, over doing it every fortnight all through the year. I wasn't really one of those 'exam stress' people.

[Mr. Carnelian]

I much prefer essays to exams.

Which is just as well, considering that my course (English Literature) is nearly completely essay-based.

Personally, I think that exams at University level are pretty much pointless. The whole point of academic research is to come up with something NEW. Of course you need to know what's gone before, but you can always look stuff up which you don't remember.

[escobert]

I almost never did homework. I would get good grades on tests and end up with like a 25% grade for homework xD If I can learn it all without homework why do I need to do it!?