Are Exam Fair and Useful?

The history of examination dates back to ancient times. At that time, examinations were carried out only in schools to assess the digestibility of the material. In the Russian system of education examinations appeared with the reforms of Peter the Great (but the most widely they were used only in the 19-20 centuries). But examinations met immediately a barrage of criticism from the representatives of the academic elite, and from ordinary teachers. Over the years examination system has repeatedly been reformed, but the discussion about its benefit is even now open.

And so, examination is a certain kind of assessment of knowledge. Examination system is particular important for both students and teachers. We will even leave behind such an important feature of the exams as a motivation to study, considering decent students who want to get knowledge in university, because for students exams are an indicator of how well they have understood and learnt the material, and also how suitable their system of study of the material is.

The importance of examinations can be noted for teachers too – the amount of passed or failed students at the exams - is primarily a result of their work. By studying and comparing the performance of both general (the number of passed and failed students), and the individual results (answers of students on specific topics), you can find pros and cons in their system of teaching.

It is difficult to disagree with the fact that during the study of any material it is necessary to evaluate the results of this study.

Nowadays at the universities are taken oral and written exams, and in my opinion, the system is far from perfection.

Firstly, there are certain difficulties in the organization of exams. First of all in a single exam it is impossible to assess the knowledge throughout all the studied material. Of course, there are many methods, which allow us to estimate how much the student knows within an academic discipline: additional questions, which help to assess the knowledge on related topics, and during the student’s answer can be seen how much he knows. However, it still cannot give a complete picture of the true knowledge of the student. The second problem in the organization - is the easiness to cheat in exam. There are thousands of kinds of cheating, and some of them are hard to recognize for teachers. Moreover it is obvious that it is impossible to keep an eye open for the students all the time. Another difficulty in the assessment of students' knowledge is the human factor of the teacher. For example the teacher remains little strength for the last students and always doesn’t assess their knowledge properly.

Secondly, both students and teachers are people, and people, as we know - are imperfect. There is a certain part of students who can show poor results at an oral exam for the reason that they either do not have enough oratory, or cannot put themselves together, although they have crammed up all the material properly. It should also be noted that the assessment of knowledge by the teacher may be biased, and because of that a good student’s answer may be low graded by a teacher because of the subjective factor.