Exams and Technology

I hate exams. Admittedly it’s not a feeling confined just to me, but it’s a feeling that I wish to share with everyone else. I understand why people feel the need to give exams, it’s a way to test if we’ve learnt the things we’ve been taught during the first semester. The problem is that it obviously doesn’t work. It’s a problem that is well known within the educaton system, but it’s just a silly and counter-productive way of doing things.

Education aims to teach us two things, facts, and the ability to use those facts in productive ways, and great debate rages on which of the two things should have more emphasis. Maths suffers from this dilemma in a particularly irritating way. The subject lives in a small and isolated segment of the education sector where you are theoretically teaching no facts and just technique (it is true that this claim could also be held by art and music subjects, but somehow they seem to slip more into the familiar “history of…” doctrines than maths). The problem that comes from this is that standard exam technique is not really sufficient to test this kind of learning.

Your standard maths exam contains last years problems with different questions, and can usually be marked by someone with little or no knowledge of the subject. They ask for a student to got through the machinations that they have been through before to solve similar problems, and therefore test only the learning of the method, rather than any actual ability to think through the problems.

It can be argued that the actual practical value of any mathematics qualification is more the ability to think logically through a set of steps rather than to think laterally around a problem, but would such a qualificaion be much use.

Though it would make assessing each student much harder, would it not be better to see how they cope with a series of more complex problems that they have never seen before than a set of problems which they are supposed to tackle merely by rote?

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On a lighter note, I recently got a new netbook, a Samsung NC10, and it’s AWESOME! The early netbooks suffered from some real problems, runing extremely slowly, and seeming as if their size had completely nerfed their functionality. For me, this is the first netbook I’ve really seen that actually seems to be useful, despite its tiny size. It has a reasonably decent battery life (4-8 hours depending on the use), and runs XP SP3 without any discernable problems. It’s basically the equivalent of a laptop just a couple of years ago, but much smaller and extremely light. I’m very pleased with the purchase, and highly recommend it!

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