The curricula of most education institutions are built by specialists that put significant emphasis on exams as the sole type of student evaluation. They dismiss the necessity of alternative assessment methods, such as practical laboratories and projects. I disagree with this opinion and this essay will explore the arguments for why student’s performance should be measured both by exams and continual evaluation.
The main argument against solely assessing students’ performance via standard exams is that they only measure theorical understanding of a subject. Despite the fairness involved in written examinations, for most disciplines, they are only useful to measure content coverage of a theorical subject. To exemplify, in most schools and universities, closed-book exams consider on a range of content available in the course syllabus which disregards any hands-in assessment. However, the problem with this style of evaluation is that students tend to prepare themselves only for the exam, prioritizing short-term memorization, instead of long-term knowledge acquisition. For instance, a reserach showed that 50% of students from American Universities just study topics that will be on the exam, ignoring remaining content of a discipline.
The main idea in favor of continual assessment is that they can complement exam evaluations pushing students to learn practical topics. Laboratory, projects and courseworks are methods to show whether students can transform theorical concepts into practice. For example, exams are a part of evaluation of Computer Science disciplines, but assessments often contain semester-long projects that demonstrate the students’ ability to build a reliable and robust software based on Software Enginneering principles. Additionally, continual assessment can estimulate students’ criativity and out-of-the-box thinking, as they face problems in coursework that are not possible on a paper exam. As an example, projects in biology and chemistry laboratories often involve unexpected variables that can impact the end result of an experiment. Evaluation in this case demonstrate students’ adaptation and problem solving skills.
In conclusion, written exams are not enough to measure whether student domain a certain knowledge. For most disciplines, practical assessments, such as projects and labs, are utmost important to understand whether students can put theorical knowledge into real-world practice.