Timed tests in Schools

Great Debates
1

I didn’t think this had sufficient magnitude for a great debate so I put it here. I hope it’s not unsuitable.

As a student who will very shortly be taking quite a lot of timed tests I I think they are a truly awful idea. The student is led into a hall and made to write four essays in three hours (as per my Russian History Exam) and has to regurgitate at least two years work on the subject in that miniscule amount of time.

The positive effects of this method of testing as I see them are:

a) It shows that the student really knows his/her facts.

The negative effects of this method of testing as I see them are:

a) It pressurises the students. A student could be very capable in a relaxed classroom/lecture hall setting but could be highly strung and flunk out in the exams.

b) If a student is tired, hungry, slightly ill on the day of the exam his level of performance would drop drastically.

c) Students who are slow writers (as I am) are at a natural disadvantage.

d) It gears teaching methods towards one pivotal moment, the exam. This forces teachers to:

(i) Stick rigidly to a timetable. This would mean that some work may be rushed in order to fit in with the timetable.

(ii)Place an inordinate amount of time on training a student to regurgitate, parrot fashion, facts, figures and dates at the expense of true understanding.

e) Students are encouraged to focus solely on the exam and nothing else, this discourages the student from investigating extra curricular learning materials which could help broaden a students knowledge of the topic as they would distract from studies of recognised exam texts. For example a student studying Orwells 1984 would be discouraged to read Animal farm, for instance, even though reading it would give insights into Orwells literary techniques, because it is a distraction from the study of 1984.

The Government doesn’t care about how well students are educated, just how well they do in the exam. They only care about making the grades, figures and quotas. They put this ahead of true learning and understanding. This is a disgusting travesty, does anyone else agree?

2

Oops, seems like I did post it in GD afterall. Please bear with me, I’ve got flu :frowning:

3

I think it sounds like a fine GD topic.

I think it makes a difference whether you’re talking about grade school, high school, or college. I agree that the timed CAT and Iowa tests for grade school kids are pretty dumb, but hey, we gotta have those statistics to make us happy. :rolleyes:

For high school kids, tests like the ACT and SAT and others are just a necessary fact of life. Gotta have those test scores to get into a good college… :rolleyes:

But I agree with you if you’re talking about college level courses. My take on this would be something along the lines of, “Life is about pressure, and this is one way to test more than just facts about Russia.” Other than teaching you how to cope with pressure, how to perform when you’ve got the flu, I don’t see much value in being able to “Beat the Clock” and spit out facts on cue.

But as the child of teachers, I do see the value in putting a time limit on the testing period. “When will Daddy be home from work?” “As soon as he’s finished sucking all the knowledge out of his Russian History class, dear.”
:smiley:

4

I used to teach college and here are my thoughts.

First, I agree that timed tests are not the best. The tests you give have to be short and or superficial. If tests can not have a time limit, I could ask test questions that require more thought and time (I bet you didn’t consider that…no time limit…longer tougher tests)

There are problems in getting rid of time limits. Classes are scheduled every hour ususally and you can’t go over because some students have a class the next hour. You personally can’t clear your schedule for a block of time since you may have other classes/responsibilites. What can be done is that you schedule all your classes to have a test the same day and reserve a room and have people come in whenever they want to take the test. Say close the room at 7 p.m. but until then they have as much time as they want.

This works but still has some problems. The lack of flexibility saying that all classes have a test day on this day. Another big one is how do you stop cheating? – someone takes a test then tells others what is on the test. You could have multiple versions but this takes much time and how can you be sure one version isn’t harder than another?

You will also have people grumbling that they cannot set a block of time aside – day full of classes and/or must work. They then complain it is unfair since others get more time for the same test.

I think timed tests are used not because they are good, but because it avoids ‘issues’.

Blink

5

I was used to doing timed tests in Australia (max 3 hours), then I came to Sweden I found myself having 6 hour long exams. This is more time than necessary for completion (by at least 1 hour). Of course, I was under no pressure, so I actually didn’t finish one exam because I was watching the snow fall past the window and lost track of time :slight_smile: .

On the other hand, in Australia the exam at the end often was only 50% of my final grade, sometimes less. The other half of the grade came from assignments (2 weeks to do it in) and labs, but that was engineering. But most of the university courses seemed to be going away from one important exam and many assessments through the year. So they are slowly becoming less important. I have even taken courses which didn’t have an exam. But I have no idea on the American system.

6

The thing is, students are always pressurized, no matter how much time they have. Give a guy an hour, he’ll write for an hour. Give a guy four hours, he’ll write frantically for four hours, filling in page after page, notebook after notebook, until his time runs out, or he’s run out of things to write, or his pen falls out of his numb, lifeless fingers. Trust me - I’ve been there.

That’s not to say that all exams are about regurgitating facts. From what I’ve seen, most profs and assistants give points for originality, creative thinking and intuitive leaps - so long as they’re grounded in facts and logic. Most of them are so bored by reading the same test, over and over, that they’re overjoyed to see something new. (Note - this philosophy works best in the Humanities, and in some fields of the Social Sciences. Don’t try it in law school, or engineering).

As a veteran of a non-American university, I have to concur with FloChi - very few courses were based on one single exam. Most had midterms, papers, presentations, etc.; enough to soften the blow of a single test. Besides, Israeli schools always give every exam on two seperate dates, so that if you fail the first one (or simply choose not to take it - if you have too many tests, too close together) you can always do it again. The lecturers don’t like it, as they have to write two seperate tests for every course, but the concept is very popular among the students.

7

Another product of a non-American educational system checking in. When I was in a Canadian university, three-hour exams were the norm, and could be worth up to 60% of the final grade. Hey, I even wrote one on Russian history!

But let’s address the OP:

You say that it “pressurizes” students, and that if a student isn’t feeling quite at peak form on test day, they might perform poorly.

No argument there–actually, I used to feel the same way.

Then I got into the business world, with its pressure and deadlines. When you’re sitting there racing the clock to get a report or something done on time, you look back and realize that those timed exams were actually a pretty good preparation for this sort of thing.

You had to be able to use quick recall and to be able to organize thoughts in a relatively short period of time. True, reference works and things could be available in business, but often weren’t for one reason or another: “Quick! I need the Williams file!” “Sorry, Johnson’s still working on it and won’t have it ready until Tuesday.” “Damn! Guess I’ll have to make do without it.”

And illness and suchlike wasn’t an excuse–it was a sign of weakness, and a cause to question whether you were really dedicated and suitable to the work.

Oh, and did I mention that if you couldn’t handle the pressure, it wasn’t a case of repeating the coursework next year? It was quite simply that your job was on the line. Now, that’s pressure!

You also mention about "regurgitating…parrot fashion."

I could understand this if it was a fill-in-the-blank test, or true-false, or something like those. But this is Russian history, and if you don’t get some essay questions that you can really sink your teeth into, then I’d be very surprised.

Does your instructor encourage you to ask questions? “What if Lenin had never taken the sealed train back to Russia?” Why is Peter the Great called ‘the first Russian revolutionary’?" What if? What happened? Why is it significant? These are the questions you have to address in exams for history courses.

Propose. Postulate. Examine. Discuss. Compare. This is not regurgitating; this is answering critically and analytically. Yes, you can use the facts you have been taught, but use them within the context of an essay answer that does all of the above. Use the time you have been given to plan and write a well-thought-out answer, and you will receive a higher mark that the person who just barfs back bare facts.

You also note that the curriculum "discourages the student from investigating extra curricular learning materials…"

Well, who is stopping you? Is there some sort of rule that says you cannot read Animal Farm in addition to the assigned 1984? And citing it?

I’m sorry if I sound a bit strident, but I did just that when I wrote my Russian history exams. I’d cite recent issues of Time and Newsweek if they helped me make my point, and I wasn’t at all shy about citing Russian literature in history papers, or Russian history in political science courses, or…but you get the idea. Surely your instructor would only look favourably on a student who takes on the challenge of reading things that are not on the required reading list but are relevant to the subject.

Besides, Animal Farm is only about a two-hour read. You can easily find time for it. Besides, it’s fun to read and compare to the actual events you’ve been learning about.

I’m sorry, Voice of Reason, but I cannot agree with you. You may not like it now, and think that it is a horribly unfair system, but these exams are not the only ones you’ll ever have to do–there will be others in the future, but they won’t necessarily be written in the classroom and timed with a stopwatch. They will be in real life, and timed against circumstance–and often without the chance for a makeup exam.

Just my two cents. Hope you’re not discouraged.

8

Well Animal farm was a bad example, a better one would be that a student might not be encouraged to read Ulysses if they were studying Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because Ulysses is about 3 times the size of Portrait… and requires additional of work in itself to really get to grips with it. I agree that nothing is stopping the student but when I used to study English Lit. I was encouraged to stay focussed on the books I was studying as opposed to broadening my range.

Absolutely not, they’re good points one and all and have given me a lot to think about. I still have some misgivings about the timed test system but there are certainly more points in its favour than I had previously given credit for. I guess I’ll just have to work to the system I’ve been given and, reading through the posts in this thread, that might not be such a bad thing afterall.