adminMusaemura Jabulani Sithole Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University
The current debate on the relevance of examinations has aroused a lot of interest from professional educationists and the general public. Examinations have been blamed for laying emphasis on passing the exam rather than imparting knowledge to the students. An important lesson from this statement is that examinations are so powerful that they can be used to influence the direction of our curriculum. We should therefore use these examinations to encourage students to focus on the subject content of our New Curriculum.
You do not dispose of the child on the basis of high medical expenses. In short, failure on our part to properly structure examinations to achieve our goals does not make them irrelevant. It is imperative that we retain examinations in our education system for the following reasons:
1.Examinations help to provide a specification of clear goals for teachers and students, thus controlling the disparate elements of the education system, helping to ensure that all schools teach the same standards. Issues regarding uniformity and standardization are best achieved with examinations as the environment under which assignments are written is difficult to control. Even in tertiary institutions, cases of students who pay other students to write assignments for them, have been recorded with female students even paying in kind.
2.Examinations are essential in selecting students for further education, as they are perceived to allocate scarce educational benefits in an objective and unbiased way.
3.Examinations have a certification function, though this is often lost sight of because of the emphasis on their use for selection. Formal certification of academic achievements can be important for some students in gaining access to employment or training.
Employers need to know whether a distinction held by a student from school A is worth the same as the one held by a student from school B.
4Examinations can be used to underpin changes in curriculum and teaching methods and to maintain national standards. In Zimbabwe, examinations can be used to underpin our new curriculum since teachers concentrate more on subject content that is set in examinations.
5.Examinations, especially when results are published, may serve an accountability function for teachers and schools. A teacher’s performance is assessed according to the pass rate of his/her students while schools are ranked nationally on the basis of exam results.
6. Examinations at the end of O and A Level schooling, legitimate membership in the international global society, and facilitate international mobility. It is no secret that a student’s entry into a university, within or outside Zimbabwe, is determined by ones attainment in recognized public examinations governed by international standards.
7. Examinations are an easy tool to regularly assess a student’s capability. Exams help a lot to bring an improvement in the individual’s knowledge because they provide regular feedback to the students who acknowledge their shortcomings and work on them.
8.Examinations promote competition among students. They work harder to improve their knowledge and skills. In this way they learn more. Also, exams are excellent tools to determine the efficacy of teaching methods because teachers get an opportunity to monitor and evaluate their teaching strategies according to their student’s progress.
Examinations also have the following disadvantages:
1.Firstly, they have a poor predictive quality because they only judge a student’s ability under set conditions and limited time. Many times a student who is otherwise good may get anxious or confused under strict exam conditions and may not perform up to the mark.
2.Secondly, many exams encourage teaching to the test practice. This is to say, teaching a fixed curriculum focused on passing a specific exam. However, this can easily be overcome by widening the scope of the examination to discourage the teaching of a fixed curriculum.
However, if some improvements are made to remove the above mentioned drawbacks, exams certainly provide many educational advantages. Therefore, I believe that the benefits of exams far outweigh their drawbacks.
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