Students all over the world are graded through exams. While learning is a complex process in which different aspects can progress at different speeds, a single number is often used as a qualification to summarize the overall achievement. The simplicity of the number allows to order a group of students in a hierarchy according to their level of performance.
An exam can show the strengths and weaknesses of the student, thus helping him to address the latter. This requires a teacher to highlight both, rather than just grading with a number, what is not always the case. Also, this takes for granted a student that wants to learn and is ready to go through the material after the exam, rather than discarding it after pocketing his qualification.
A frequent problem with qualifications is that students take them as the end of their effort, instead of the learning itself. This perverts the whole process, substituting the means for the ends. Rewarding the qualifications promotes this perversion.
In principle, it makes sense to reward the performance of students. To start with, prizes are a good incentive to stimulate desired behaviours, and the hard work of study can certainly do with some stimulus. Also, a learning career can reach different stages, with the upper echelons not being accessible to everybody.
The number of bachelors who graduate from a particular career has to be limited, both to limit the cost of training the students, and to adjust the number of graduates to the job market. In many, if not most, careers the process leads to the production of qualified workers. Thus, teaching centres (including universities) get oriented towards professional training rather than human development. While this is not something exclusive of the modern capitalist environment, capitalism certainly fosters these dynamics.
Offering the most demanded learning positions to the higher achieving students stimulates their effort at the same time that it hogs the better performers for the training scheme, boosting the prestige of the teaching institution. This follows a capitalist strategy at the same time that it promotes meritocracy, as opposed to selecting students according to their capacity to pay the highest fees.
The problem of this strategy is that it primes students to maximize their grades, which is not necessarily the same thing as promoting their learning.
Students can study toward their exams, adapting their learning to the method of testing and laying aside deeper understanding, links with related matters, further implications of the material or anything that could develop their minds (or their professional performance) but is not reflected in the exams. Also, the timing of the study can be geared to face the exams, with binge-memorizing before the tests rather than a long run, more profound learning. Naturally, this strategy excludes revising the material after the exam to learn from one´s mistakes.
This problem can get compounded with the limitations of certain types of exam. In particular, multiple choice tests require students to mark with an “X” the right answer among a few options. When this method of testing becomes dominant, as it happens in many universities, you can end up having university graduates who are unable to write properly a composition on a topic. When writing their dissertation at the end of their careers, they show the lack of basic skills that supposedly they had acquired in primary school.
When this happens, you realize that students don´t read books because they can´t spare time from their studies. They might take fast notes when attending lectures, but they never write a proper composition. When computers or tablets get in the game, as sources of information framed in bullet-points, or as a place to write their notes, things get even worse (and the worst effects of artificial intelligence are not here yet). In many cases, the only thing that matters to students is storing data in their brain to tick the right boxes in the exams. Thus, they achieve the best possible grades with which to compete with other students (who are their rivals, not their fellows).
In extreme cases, we end up having brilliant students with very poor cooperation skills, limited capacity for abstract thought and miserable writing skills, but who have a good short term memory and some discipline to keep on studying. Hail the people of tomorrow!
Comentarios recientes