The Exam and the Plough

I appreciate exams because they provide schools with an efficient way to judge whether students have actually grasped hold of the material covered in their courses. They force students to be responsible for the material and they give them and incentive to learn the material. As students we know what to expect because we have had to write exams and tests throughout our entire education, except maybe kindergarten and grade one. (I think we all still have a bit of nostalgia for those “good old days.” A few have never entirely stopped living in the past).

But exams also represent a form of education that is incomplete. They promote the view between both those that administer the exams—teachers, employers, those in government—and students that the purpose for education is production. If students cannot reproduce on an exam what they have learned, then it is as if the education was not worth it. This idea, that education has to have a timely measurable return to be economically worthwhile, is enforced throughout the entire education system: in scholarships, acceptance standards, the semester system, papers, and exams. And although none of us might totally agree with it, we support this view every time we walk into the exam room and sit down for three hours to write.

Exams fail to measure our intellectual health, our ability to nurture new ideas, and also the fertility of our minds. In the midst of this cycle of production, we become aware of other needs like rest and contemplation; but the system we learn in does not leave a lot of room for this and has few tools to cultivate it. Perhaps we should take up Robert Frost's plea for farmers to give up a harvest and plough under a crop for the sake of building soil, and, likewise, for us to take our ideas and the things we learn and just turn them under. Let the ideas steep for a while for the sake of nourishing our thoughts. Just as production is made a necessity in our educations, it seems as if the abolition of the opportunities and tools with which to contemplate is almost as much of necessity to that system.

When people criticise of exams, they actually criticise our society's inability to find a tool for the cultivation of contemplation and learning. Sometimes we feel tired and drained, just like land that is never given time to lie fallow but is repeatedly harvested until any ability to nurture growth is sapped. We feel exploited. But like the land, we do still have a responsibility to produce—however, what type of fruit we value still has not really been discussed.

Education needs to incorporate two tracks, one being the one that is tested by exams, and the other being the track of contemplation and “turning under.” How we are going to develop tools and opportunities to provide this contemplation.

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