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We have all been there, cramming just hours before an exam that accounts for a quarter of your entire grade, that you should have started studying for days prior. As you desperately try to teach yourself the material, you start to give up: “Screw It. Full Send.”
While this is one of my worst academic nightmares, many students find even more fear and stress in essay-writing. No one finds tranquility in trying to write a five page paper the night before it’s due.
Much debate exists as to what form of assessment is “better” or “more productive.” At first, the question really becomes what would you rather do: take exams or write essays. However, one could argue that it is important to consider which method is least stressful for students and the most fair assessment of the knowledge students have retained in their classes. Additionally, is it fair for students that assessments are often seen as the sole evaluators of our understanding of class material?
In my own experience, I have found that there are two types of students: people who are STEM-oriented and those who are humanities-based, with very few being a little bit of both. Stereotypically, STEM majors prefer exams over papers and humanities papers over exams. Of course, the solution seems very easy then for STEM and humanities majors: assess STEM majors through exams and humanities majors through papers. However, the problem with this seemingly simple solution is the skills we acquire through paper-writing are fundamental to the liberal arts education. When we write essays, we are not just being tested on content alone, we are also being tested on grammar, vocabulary, and articulation. Writing a paper requires not just attention and focus, but also active intellectual stimulation, because it is harder to cheat on a paper because professors are usually able to detect when something is plagiarized. Arguably then, I believe that writing a paper is more intellectually stimulating than taking an exam because it tests a multitude of different skills while also assessing your own understanding of the content.
Now, many people may disagree with this statement, the first counterargument being that paper-writing does not come naturally to everybody. At the heart of this concern is the fact that people have varying levels of proficiency in the English language. Even people who have English as their first language can agree that the English language is honestly just really weird. I, even as someone who is an English major, find myself mispronouncing certain words or struggling with something as elementary as the difference between “affect” and “effect.” With that being said, for students whose first language is not English, I could see essays being more taxing than exams because of the language barrier at hand. I believe, though, that there can be ways for professors to accommodate this; plus, we have great resources such as peer tutors and the writing center.
Another concern lies in test-anxiety. Of course, we all get anxious before exams; you’d be lying if you said you never have. However, take that level of stress and multiply it by a hundred: that’s how many students with generalized anxiety feel every time they are taking an exam. Thus there is a huge difference between test-anxiety and generalized anxiety that gets in the way of performing well on tests, because while test-anxiety is fairly common, for people like myself, my anxiety completely disables my ability to perform at the level of my intellect on exams.
It always goes something like this: I study for an exam, starting days before. I do everything from flashcards to practice tests until I believe I am fully confident in the material. However, the second I am handed an exam, my mind goes completely blank and I begin to panic: I can’t seem to remember any of the material. As I stare at the first question, I try to make a logical guess by eliminating answers that just seem wrong. However, five, ten minutes go by: people are flipping the page and I haven’t even marked an answer for that first question. Suddenly, I hear the sound of someone getting up to ask the teacher a question. “Uh, professor, I don’t understand what you’re asking on problem six…” Now I turn to problem six: if this kid who I know is smart has a question, then I probably should be listening too. “Sorry, I can’t help you with that one.” Great, now I just wasted two minutes trying to finesse my way around spending ten minutes on problem six. As I try to divert my attention back to the first problem, the noise of pages flipping and pencils-to-paper begins to serve as the ultimate distraction. I look at my exam and back at the clock: now all I can hear is the clock ticking. The clock serves as a constant reminder that despite the extra time I receive, I will not finish this exam. As I start to frantically move on, I begin to doubt my abilities, thinking, “I must be pretty dumb if it’s taking me ten minutes to answer a stupid, singular multiple choice question.” Now, I have convinced myself I am stupid and won’t pass: an exam I thought I was capable of getting an A on, I get a C.
In my opinion, while students with learning disabilities, anxiety, or ADHD are able to receive special accommodations– and don’t get me wrong, I use every second of my extra time and am thankful I am usually able to take most exams in a separate room– these accommodations don’t suddenly make test anxiety and other such problems disappear. You can’t really unlearn those thoughts you feel in regards to test-taking because it takes time and effort to change the way we think and build confidence in our academic capabilities. I can learn how to write a paper in the course of weeks or months, but I can’t easily undo that I simply do not test well.
Now I’m not saying all people feel the same as I do, but the assumption that test anxiety is more fixable or easier to accommodate undermines the feelings and struggles of those who do. By no means, of course, is it a competition as to what form of assessment is more discriminatory, because you can make a solid argument that neither is “fair.” Though, I believe that because schools and universities sort of rely on exams because we as a society have generally agreed that recall exams are a pretty reliable measure of knowledge, we so often see these as the best way to learn even though most will just cram for an exam the night before.
However, there are so many ways you can learn how to become a good test-taker. Thus, I would propose, if we can learn how to take tests, how much are they really testing our knowledge? You can’t cheat on a paper; you can sort of “fake cheat” on exams; there are strategies of ways of working around forgetting material, such as picking one letter and choosing it for all the multiple choice, process of elimination, paying careful attention to the wording of questions, etc… While yes, it is scientifically proven that recall significantly helps us better understand content, who’s to say paper-writing is also not an effective form of recall? If someone has thought-provoking ideas about the content and can at least somewhat articulate them in a paper, then they have successfully mastered a good chunk of the content.
All in all, no form of assessment is perfect. Yet, I believe that a de-emphasis on exams as perhaps the most common form of assessing students’ understanding of class material would be a sigh of relief for people, like myself, who would much rather write a paper than have to deal with the stress of an exam.