Exams, in the way they are configured are really a waste of time, as many of the posters of this thread have already pointed out. What you actually "get" from school and take to the workforce and life should be the ability to read, write, comprehend, and think using the given material.
Education is merely a broad swath of general education to allow you tools to tune to life as you need to apply them. Almost no course actually gives you the tools to go to work immediately for your employer and do what is needed other than in a general sense, if at all. There is always the learning curve that begins after you are hired until you can be turned loose unassisted to do the job. In a large amount of cases you are faced with yet more school, in some form or other, to come up to speed with what you are expected to do.
In general school, most exams are what the teacher of the course thinks is important. How important it actually is depends solely on that teacher and how close to real life they see things. Sadly, in most cases, this is not what is on the teachers mind as they prepare the exam. More in mind is how to arrange the test for easy grading, what particular subject within the course is of interest to the teacher, and how the last years test was arranged so as to try and foil any who had access to it.
State standardized tests are even worse. As they do not try to take into account what might have been a major learning experience within the classroom. Rather, they look at the subject and say you should have been exposed to this info and therefore should be able to do this. Applicable or not. So teachers are forced to remain within a rigid framework to cover the ground that prepares the student for the next step towards that goal.
Those with good memory do well. those with poor memory or attention span do not do as good. In most cases it is not what you learned but what you can regurgitate on command. Short term memory is all that is engaged and so the learning curve becomes a cliff at the end of the exam.
It is obvious that our schooling system needs major overhaul. But how to fix it? When government gets involved it usually leaves a tangled mess, such as the system now in place. Parents move to locations that qualifiy their children to go to a school that the parents see as benefical to their childrens' learning in some cases. This hardly smacks of education for all. Certainly not quality education, which should be the goal for all who can obtain such and make use of it. Public schools, in some cases, are in such a sad state of affairs that parents will pay for private schooling. Further, public schools constantly face budget cuts, which hinder the student, by lack of learning materials, while the schooling adminstration absorbs a goodly portion of the funds for their salaries. All of this at the determient of the students education. In the end this is reflected by the quality of education and then the quality of the testing and what the testing subjects are to be. Though I do not have the answers to relieve the situtation, I can percieve where there are huge holes within the education process. These holes result in poor education. Where there is poor education, so are the tests that grade a student on how well they have been able to make use of what they have been exposed to.
Yet another problem is that our knowledge is doubling faster than a student or teacher can keep up with. What is being taught in school is now outdated when the student recieves that info. As such only the basics can be given in hopes that a general base is given for which the student can build upon to actually make use of when it comes time to use such knowledge.
