How is it that I can love to learn, but hate to have my learning examined (formally)?

Perhaps it is because I am not learning properly..or perhaps I am not being examined properly.

When we are learning something, we tend to assume that the person teaching us is also the best person to evaluate our learning.

However, though that may sound perfectly logical and reasonable. I believe otherwise.

I believe that in many cases, the ones doing the teaching do not know best how to evaluate my understanding. All they can do, is administer a generalized formula of examination.


Two main flaws hinder such generalized examinations though:


1- Conceptually, for an examination to be valid and efficient, it must examine what is "relevant" to the student in the learning experience.

The problem here lies in defining relevance, because it can be highly variant, subjective and relative.

Relevance does not fundamentally depend on what the educational system defines as being so. Rather, the educational institution's definition of "relevance" will likely be a generalization made accordingly to what "stake-holders" will have expressed.

Stakeholder interests include that of students seeking further competence and knowledge, but also market forces through the labor needs of its main motor industries. These "motor industries" comprise both public institutions such as the health-care industry, as well as private sector through various corporate industries.

This raises questions about the legitimacy of the educational institution's competence in defining the points of "relevance" that will outline the evaluation policies behind examinations.

I put an excessive amount of emphasis on examinations because they often set the pulse of the course curriculum.

One should wonder whether schools are designed to develop the individuals potential and citizenship, or the individual's potential as a working unit.

Again, defining relevance is difficult because 2 individuals with clearly different goals, talents and attitudes often follow the same course of study.

Certainly, a person taking a management course with the objective of opening a Starbucks coffee business in an upper-middle class neighborhood does not have the same aspirations as a person taking that same course in order to establish a non-profit organization which would specialize in promoting fair trade coffee.

Though we can agree that being familiar with general management principles is essential to both individuals cited above, the nature of the managerial concepts, and the system of values that sustain the relevance of each concepts are clearly different and particular to each individual.

That is why it is important to elaborate a personal appreciation of what is relevant to us in what we study. Otherwise, we may be surrendering our potential by pursuing objectives that are not truly helping us, all while neglecting to nurture the ones that would.

It is often tempting and easier to simply follow objectives defined by others.. but we must not forget that they are often the result of long efforts and were elaborated according to their own set of values.

There is nothing more anti-academic than to study something uniquely because you need to collect the corresponding credits in order to obtain a degree. To make an anti-academic practice mandatory to the achievement of a degree (the ultimate symbol of academia) is to me incoherent.

When a student studies not because he understands the relevance of the matter "de facto" with his own goals, but because an institutional ordinance has been emmited by which it is relevant "de jure" independently of his goals, simply by having chosen to pursue the given course of study.

Imagine getting into a public-transit bus where you are constrained to get off where the majority of bus riders will get off, independently of where you actually want to go.

That is what I think is happening with our educational system.

The right to stop at a particular location for a majority of bus riders is not irreconcilable with the right of the individual passenger to request a stop for himself. Particularly when keeping in mind that the individual has paid the same fare for what is a public service.

In the same manner that the public transit system does not distribute it's service in the form of a single approximated service. The public education system, should distribute neither it's teaching nor it's examining services in a single approximated form within a class.


2- The second main flaw is in regards to the "timing" effect.

The problem here is with the management of knowledge and information.

Examinations in their current practice and format are extremely time-biased.

They are hardly ever reliable in terms of durable representativity.

They tend to evaluate memory capacity rather than understanding. Otherwise, evaluations would occur quasi-instantly to the exposure of the knowledge.

It is often ridiculous and irrelevant to evaluate through an integrated final exam when students do not have access to their notes or material. They will be rewarded or penalized according to the amount of information they were able to memorize.

The principle I promote being that: You cannot explain something you understand but can't remember, but You can understand something you'ved never memorized.

I am not saying that memory is not important in learning and applying knowledge.

I am however suggesting that there may be a certain level of hypocrisy in the educational system's way of managing examinations.

Knowing very well that the mind will not retain information that is not relevant, the examination approach still favors students that emphasize the development of "short-term memorization-based learning skills". (Will likely be forgotten within a year's time.)

A system today that celebrates such an approach deserves in my opinion to be redesigned.