Do Examinations Promote Learning?
Do Examinations Promote Learning?
Reflections on the "blue-book blues"
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The academic portion of the college experience consists of reading, attendance at lectures, writing papers, participation in discussions, conducting experiments, studying for examinations, and taking examinations. You can replicate most of these at times and places of your own choosing. That is, you can read, listen to podcasts, write, and converse to your heart’s content. You can even turn your kitchen, bathroom, or garage into a laboratory. The one thing that you cannot easily do is simulate all of the experiences associated with formal examinations.
You can, of course, mimic some of the elements of the examination experience. Many study guides, for example, provide practice tests of various sorts. For the price of a small blue notebook, a stopwatch, and several cups of coffee, you can even re-enact an essay examination. (You will find suitable collections of questions in older guides to various entrance examinations.) What you cannot do, however, is reproduce the anxiety endured by those anticipating such assessments, let alone the pressure to perform felt in the course of these evaluations.
Intra muros, exam-induced pressure serves chiefly as a second-rate substitute for joyful motivation. Thus, it has nothing to offer to the autodidact, who is already well supplied with curiosity, appreciation, and love of learning. The taking of timed academic tests, however, may have some benefit for the self-directed learner. Thus, for example, a well-designed objective test can help you discover gaps in your knowledge. Likewise, writing essays in response to unfamiliar prompts can foster such skills as the rapid organization of ideas and the application of things that you already know to new problems.
I think that is a good point about the novel questions that force you to build new concepts out of existing knowledge. It is often easy for the auto-didact to collect ideas and concepts on their mental shelves, but more difficult to find the external necessity to goad them into putting them together in novel ways, or reconciling distinct but related theories that otherwise sit comfortable in our heads together.
I always hated exams, considering that the teachers took the multiple choice option, and none of the answers seemed right to me. I wanted to answer each question in an Essay fashion, with several paragraphs showing that I had read the required text. I absolutely despised having to choose one answer out of four choices. Ah well, it's long since over, and the only exams I have to take are for work.