Last week was exam week at our local high schools.  As the father of a Grade 10 student – and having had three kids pass through high school already – I have had conflicting feelings about summative testing.  I wanted my kids to do well for self-esteem and future opportunities, but have always felt, even prior to becoming a teacher, that exams were less than an authentic measure of a person’s knowledge and thus have tried to downplay any expectations of what it meant to be successful.

As I picked up my son last week after his last of five exams for the first term, my ideas about these rituals began to crystallize.  Piling into the car, I asked him how his exam went.  His response – as usual – “OK”.

After a brief pause he asked rhetorically;

“Why do we write exams?  They are kind of like cheating.  They don’t measure what we know. They give us all this information, we memorize it, we write it on the paper and then forget it.  We don’t really learn anything.”

Whoa!  The kids even see how false is their supposed “learning”.  I was blown away by the simplicity of his insights, shared by his friend in the back seat.

So, if we can agree that simple content recall isn’t a measure of anything but how well a student has learned to “play school”, what is the answer?

I would argue that exams don’t need to be eradicated, just modified.  Instead of closed-book, content focused assessments where students simply regurgitate answers fed to them by a teacher over the course of several weeks, why not focus on the process.  Exams could look different, like real-life.

My supervisor has recounted how he gave an “exam” once where he gave one question; design and create a solution to a problem.  All information was available, the issue was authentic and the solution might not even be limited to course content.  Wouldn’t this be a better measure of student learning?

For now, my son has helped my learning process.  You see, it’s in the (sometimes brief) conversations where real learning takes place.

How would / could our exams look different five years from now?

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Photo Credit: Setting The Tone For the Exam; Uploaded to Flickr on June 8, 2006 by rileyroxx