MICHELLE WAKIM, BTN REPORTER (VIA TEXT MESSAGE): Do you feel underprepared?
FRIEND (VIA TEXT MESSAGE): Do you?
MICHELLE (VIA TEXT MESSAGE): No, but do you?
FRIEND (VIA TEXT MESSAGE): Lol no. There is no way we could be underprepared.
My friend and I sent these messages to each other the night before our Year 12 English exam, more than 10 years ago. We were stressed and exhausted, after weeks of non-stop exam revision, and thousands of teenagers across the country are currently in the same position.
BINAYPREET, STUDENT: 30 per cent is in two exams. It's an oral exam and a written exam. I've said ‘exam’ too many times.
DION, STUDENT: Exams do make me really nervous and make me very anxious compared to assignments and that's because of how I learn personally.
SANTINO, STUDENT: Yeah I have a chemistry and maths exam next week. Preparing for exams never actually stressed me out. It's more like in the moment, once I forget something, it's, it’s done from there.
But are exams worth all the stress? Are they actually the best way to test our knowledge?
BINAYPREET: In general, I think they're a bit outdated to be honest. In certain subjects, like languages, that's where I think they are a good measure of knowledge.
DION: I don’t feel like they’re a very holistic way of testing someone's knowledge. I'm much more of a fan of essays, you know, presentations, things that are really heavy on writing and literacy.
SANTINO: It's just your memory; it's not your knowledge. It’s just what you remember; not what you think.
FRIEND (VIA TEXT MESSAGE): How do we get out of doing the bio exam on Friday?
Exams have been around for a while. In Australia, they started to become popular in the late 19th century and over the years, became a staple of education and assessment because, well, they're efficient and cost effective. They take minimal resources, test lots of students at once, are easy to mark, and are a way to gain a simple and clear measure of success and failure across a big population. But some experts say they have their limitations.
A couple of years ago, two academics from the University of Melbourne reviewed more than a hundred research papers, which looked at the benefits and drawbacks of exams. The team identified and assessed seven themes, which included knowledge retention, real-world relevance, validity, wellbeing, and fairness, and found that exams seem to still be around today because, well, they are still efficient and cost effective. They also found there are more meaningful and authentic ways to test knowledge.
Someone who agrees with this is YJ Kim, a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Adelaide.
YJ KIM, SENIOR LECTURER AND RESEARCHER, THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE: I research assessment, particularly assessment that can be really fun and engaging for young people. So, standardised testing, with multiple choice items, that are crammed and within certain time blocks,at the end of the year, happens once. These are all bad practices that, they have so many threats in terms of assessment qualities, such as validity and fairness. We as an education assessment field understand that and scientific evidence shows that that's not the best way we go about measuring students' learning. But nonetheless, we're doing it.
SANTINO: After an exam, your brain kind of like relaxes and then you forget because you've just poured it all out into this exam. But with an assignment, I've noticed that stuff that I'm writing about something that I've chosen, I retain the knowledge more than if I was to just revise it for a test.
YJ KIM: The phrase we're looking for is ‘teaching for testing’. How we go about testing really drives what's happening in schooling. What they are measuring? Your discrete knowledge, right? Memorisation.
When YJ talks about 'discrete knowledge' in this context, she means memorising facts without really looking at the relevance or application of those facts. Recently, news broke that nine Queensland high schools taught the wrong topic for a Year 12 ancient history exam, with students only finding out a couple of days before the assessment. While some students were given extra resources to try and learn what they needed before they sat the exam, YJ says this is an example of how 'teaching for testing' can fail students, and how with the rise of AI memorising facts may not be particularly useful, and instead, assessments should test other skills like creativity, co-operation, reasoning and problems solving.
YJ LIM: Some people call this ‘human skills’ right? Because it's something that is very unique to human beings and that's something we, we are definitely better than AI. AI can give you the knowledge much faster than human beings can do.
DION: You're not going to be asked to do an exam at a workplace, but you are going to asked to collaborate with people, you are going to ask to write things, to make presentations, to speak with people, things that actually challenge your knowledge and not your memory.
BINAYPREET: The thing with exams is like you just, have to sit down, you have to focus and you just have to do it. You have to stay quiet. There's no collaboration, whereas I feel like in real life, it's all about collaboration.
On top of this, there's a lot of stress that comes with exams, which doesn't always help performance.
YJ KIM: The reason why it's so stressful is because everybody is expected to cram knowledge and then show up and there's only one shot you get, right? But just imagine a world where assessment is more ongoing, assessment is a more participatory, assessment is just embedded throughout your daily lives and in, in school lives. For example, video games. They're not easy; they're frustrating. Video games can be really useful and very strong at measuring or assessing multiple aspects of learning, not just knowledge, so problem solving skills and things like that. So it then reduces a lot of anxiety around, but also that makes assessment more authentic because you have multiple data points.
BINAYPREET: I'm stressing quite a bit about the maths exam. I know the content and I know how I'm supposed to do it, I know all the steps, I know how to get to the answer, but then when you put me in like a timed environment where it's all silent and it's like ‘everything's counting on this one thing’ kind of situation, that's where I'm like, I get really nervous and your mind kind of goes blank at the wrong time.
SANTINO: Once I see that I'm not able to do this answer, I start thinking about all the marks I'm getting out of that total and I'm like calculating the percentage in the grade, and it just, it stresses me out more.
Some experts say exams are still an important element of a balanced assessment program, the results can be useful for broader indicators about our education system, and in certain subjects they are the best way to test skills and knowledge, but we should always consider how much weight we give to such testing. So, with all of this in mind, will exams continue to be part of our education?
YJ KIM: Why are you asking all these very difficult questions? I think so. I do think so, as long as the society and the education system value evidence, objective evidence, however we define, then I think that this form of testing will continue. But I also think that we need to be careful because I think that the gap between what we're measuring in these testings and the real-life skills that young people need beyond schooling, I think it's becoming broader and broader.
SANTINO: In their respective subjects, like maths and chemistry, tests I think are good for knowing what you can revise and keep in your memory. But subjects like English, history, health, stuff like that, they don't have objective answers.
DION: Obviously, some people are going to love exams and some people are going to work better under pressure. I think that tailoring assessment, assessment types of different students' learning styles are really the best way to truly test knowledge.
BINAYPREET: I think we're finally at a time where we're really starting to recognise that people learn in different ways, and I think it’s wrong to put everyone into one assessment criteria after we know such a thing.