No set of exam results would be complete without an accompaniment of complaints from examiners about students' poor standards of grammar and spelling. But as Donald MacLeod points out, A-level students have been making mistakes for over half a century. A report from 1952 criticises candidates' "abuse of punctuation" and apparent "illiteracy".
What examiners apparently fail to take into account, however, is the enormous amount of pressure that students are under when in an exam situation, which can easily lead to a misplaced apostrophe, a "there" instead of a "their" or even the odd sentence or two of complete gobble de guk. I'm a first-hand witness to this problem.
By the end of the first three days of university finals, I had sat through 18 hours of exams (3-hour exams in both morning and afternoon for 3 consecutive days). Halfway through the afternoon of day 3 I gritted my teeth, embarked on my 18th exam answer of the week, and found that I was having serious trouble thinking in complete sentences. I've not seen the exam scripts since, but for a couple of weeks after that atrocious Wednesday afternoon, excerpts of my exam essay would appear, uninvited and unwelcome, in my mind, and I would cringe with embarrassment.
Although it probably isn't very pleasing to be faced with a pile of exam papers filled with basic errors of language, it should be remembered that during an exam situation, students are under intensive levels of stress, inevitably clouding their usual attention to accuracy.
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3 comments:
I totally agree... another problem with examining people like that is not just the fact that the level of their spelling and grammar might worsen...i don't think it's really fair to base someone's results, whether it's a levels or degree results, on a couple of weeks of written exams - the oxbridge system, in some faculties, is particularly bad for this.
I agree that exams are not a great way of gauging student knowledge or performance. Individual exam-skills vary incredibly, and students are likely to forget anything they memorized in a matter of weeks after the exams are over. Personally, I think regular papers and projects (with a fair amount of student independence) are the best way of assessing (and teaching) students.
I reckon a combination of exams and coursework is the way forward. that way it's fairer on the people who don't perform or cope well in the exam situation, as well as testing students' ability to think quickly, adapt their knowledge to a particular question, retention of information and whatever else exams are designed to test.
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