Band 5+: In many countries, formal exams are used to access assess students' ability and to judge the success of their education. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the formal exams to assess students' abilities? Do you think benefits of using formal exams outweighs the drawbacks.

Exams are conducted to most of the nations for evaluate the student’s abilities and how student can achieve success throughout their education. Although students has been struggled over anxiety and stress in the exam. while in formal exam, it boost students confidence and ignites their competitive spirit.

There are number of advantages of formal exam, Firstly they boost the confidence level of the students by enabling them to face stressful situation. Written exams builds a critical thinking ability of the student which makes them a worthy candidate for future opportunity, Also written exam is a source of anxiety for many students. Constant exposure to such exams, prepare students to face such situation. In fact there is a written exam at the end of the term encourage students to prepare strategically. If there is no exam, many student simply not study. So the written exam gives students an opportunity to know their level and also show them a new areas of improvement. secondly, Formal examination arouse competition among the students. because of that student tries to defeat their competitor this thing will further help them in adulthood while they enter in workforce.

However, in my opinion, in spite of the aforementioned pros, the cons of formal exams are significantly more. The main disadvantage is that these exams test a student’s performance on the day of exam. A lot of factors can affect it. Also, written exams encourage cramming. Students learn the answers by heart with the sole objective of scoring well in the exams. Hence, even if a student scores well in the exam, their understanding of the concept may be limited. Moreover, these exams are a source of immense anxiety for students. In fact, this anxiety itself can hurt their performance in exams. Worse still, sometimes the evaluation can be biased. Since it is not possible for the same teacher to evaluate all the answer sheets, there is no uniformity in the evaluation process.

To conclude, formal exams have their merits and demerits. They prepare the students to work hard and face competition. However, they are also stressful and biased evaluation makes them less effective. Hence, I do not believe that their merits outweigh the demerits.