High School Exams
Another Casualty of Woke Education
By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher; commentator)
In an otherwise reasonably balanced article in the Toronto Star, Janey Hurley discusses the arguments for and against what has been a mainstay for decades- final examinations for high school courses:
Some Pros
Final exams demand that students demonstrate skills, knowledge, and understanding accrued throughout an entire semester (5 months) of learning
Exams are still the norm in college and university programs as well as professional accreditation bodies, so, until that changes, part of the job of high schools is to prepare kids for that
Exams are written in an environment in which can be controlled, making cheating very difficult, thus the results are reliable
Some Cons
Exams are anxiety provoking
Exams “are not an authentic measure of what [kids] know”
Most teachers are pro exam and find the con arguments unconvincing. Sure, taking a high stakes exam is stressful, but are we really doing kids a favour by trying to remove all the stress from their lives? Kids need to learn to manage stress. Life is stressful! Kids who are not headed for College or University take locally developed or “vocational” programs which have never included exams.
As for what constitutes an authentic measure of what kids know (and can do), pencil and paper tests (of which exams are the best example) certainly have their limits, which is why the Ministry of Education limits their weight to 30% of the total grade. But that is for the standard curriculum. Kids who sign up for regional programs like the International Baccalaureate face exams that are weighted up to 80%,and parents are flocking to these programs. In university exams can be weighted up to 100%.
A teacher I know once asked the Director of Education of a large urban school board how we are preparing kids for university if we don’t have exams. The response he got was “it’s not our job to prepare kids for university”. That was shocking only in that he was saying the usually quiet part out loud.
Which brings us to the real reason school boards don’t like exams: They lower overall marks and spread out the range of marks. If you look at project or assignment marks in a given class, the range might be 60 to 100% but if you make the same class write a challenging exam, that range would often drop to 20 to 95%. It's hard to cheat on an exam. You have to know your stuff on a given day at a given time and no one is there to do the work for you.
As a result of an exam, the race-based group achievement difference is exacerbated. School boards will do anything to prevent that from happening because they are convinced any difference in aggregate outcomes for identity groups is always the result of systemic racism.
In just about any discussion of achievement in schools these days, the entrenchment of Critical Theory is the elephant in the room. School board administrators usually know better than to come right out and say it, which is why the reasons they do give for their policy decisions always seem so weak.
Until we root out Critical Theory as the operating principle of school boards, the quality of education will continue to decline.
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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Good Riddance to the Former Ontario Education Minister
BREAKING NEWS:
A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy
James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers
Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
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Chinese culture puts great emphasis on exams, and the result is demonstrably beneficial.
“School board administrators usually know better than to come right out and say it…”
Exams disappeared like the cuckoo bird because some racial groups didn’t do as well as others. Woke communists chose to lower academic challenge to avoid unequal group results.