Tis the season (or one of them anyway!) where we are marking. The summer exam period is particularly important for those who might have failed in the spring (or been forced to defer) as its the last opportunity for final year students to graduate this year or for the rest to progress into their next year of study. So it can be quite a stressful time for students.
Which does raise the question, are we stressing out the students unnecessarily? In other words, should we give them marks at all? Or indeed should we abandon exams and assessments in their present form altogether?
Its not quite as crazy an idea as it sounds. In many professions you don’t do an exam. And if you do it tends to be more of a pass/fail type exam. And the minimum passing grade (if it exists) is a lot higher than 40%. I mean would you want the pilot who has you at 30,000ft to have passed his pilot’s exam having gotten 60% of it wrong?
In most professions, instead, its a competency test. The obvious example is a driving test. Yes, you sit a theory element, but that’s more about making sure you know what a stop sign is before you take the tester out on an open road (and drive into the path of an 18 wheeler!). But the driving test itself is a simple case of either you pass it, or you fail it. There’s no middle ground.
And some tests are intentionally hard and decidedly unfair. I was told once by a pilot that many of the tests (written, in simulators or in light aircraft) that they do are excessively hard or even impossible. Sometimes they can be presented with Kobayashi Maru type scenario. In other words they are set up to fail. Which sounds unfair, but then again the whole point of such tests is to push the students and see how they react under pressure (if you can’t take the heat in a nice safe simulator, how well do you think you’ll hack it in a real emergency at 30,000 ft!). So how academia handles assessments, is very different from how industry handles it.
A lot of students these days are obsessed with their marks. When I was a student, we just accepted what mark we were given. We might go get a bit more feedback if we hadn’t done as well as expected, but that’s about it. We didn’t take it personally if we happened to get a lower than expected grade. But these days some them seem to want to challenge everything and wail like a banshee if they get anything less than an A. And some are taking to min/maxing the system. If you want to send students into a deep coma (before an operation for example), tell them such and such a thing isn’t on the final exam, but it is important stuff you’ll do next sems…..oh wait, they’re already asleep! And of course if they’ve got the slightest cough or cold within a month of an assessment (even if its after the hand in!) they’ll be looking for a deferral.
Some of this can be blamed on the defacto privatisation of UK universities, with students (and their parents) seeing a degree as a commodity that they are buying. And this is leading to students becoming increasingly perfectionist, which can lead to issues such as depression.
However, the truth is that students don’t seem to realise is that your marks aren’t as important as you think. Certainly for your first job, when you’ve nothing on your CV but your degree, it makes a difference. Having a 2.1 makes it more likely you’ll get that first foot in the door than having a 2.2. But beyond that first job, its relevance diminishes with each iteration of employment. Case in point, is there anyone reading this who has hired someone in the last year or so? Assuming they aren’t a recent graduate, can you honestly remember what was their final grade? And follow up question, did it make any difference to your decision to hire them?
And I bring this last point up because it does highlight just how silly it is to obsess over grades. Recall the story I mentioned last year, where an Oxford graduate sued his uni over only getting a 2.1 (fortunately he lost!). Note that he did this 10 years after graduation. Needless to say, if your career is still in the tank after 10 years, its not your degree that’s the problem! You want to know what it is? Go look in a mirror!
Because the truth is we in academia have increasingly been found out by employers. They know some students are gaming the system. They know that some uni’s are caving in to pressure from students and going easy on the marking. (not in mine uni, but if you’ve been following the grade inflation recently its clearly happening in other uni’s). And they know all about contract plagiarism and all the other tricks.
So they are responding with more detailed an exacting interview processes. This can include several rounds of interviews including a technical interview, as well as exams and other competency tests. Other companies will recruit several people as interns for the same job and basically whittle them down one by one survivor style. Now needlessly to say, any student whose been min/maxing the system, you ain’t going to last long in an interview process like that. Regardless of what grade you got (such as our Oxford graduate), you’ll be found out pretty quickly.
And its worth noting that in the secondary or primary school sector, some schools, under similar pressure to ourselves, are experimenting with abolishing marking. Instead they just give feedback. Of course, in academia, we’d need some sort of pass/fail system. However, that could take the form of some sort of competency test.
I’m told by lecturers in other countries how in addition to all the usual assessments students face, they’ll also have to do a viva every semester, where you go into a room and face off against a panel of lecturers who can literally grill you on any question about any topic you’ve learnt that year. And if you don’t pass mustard, they don’t let you proceed into the next phase of study.
Now while some students would breeze through tests like that no problem, others would struggle, which would mean more exam stress for them, plus probably a higher failure rate. So while it would cut out students obsessing over marks and cut exam stress for some, it won’t entirely solve all of the problems. Although it would prepare them better for the real world.
So, in the absence of any other plausible alternative, perhaps we have little choice but to keep exams.
daryanblog 