assessment – sue watling

Don’t know why I’m blogging instead of revising – probably because I accept the futility of cramming 20 weeks of study into the next 2 hours – and Facebook has gotten boring. I’m so not ready. It’ll take more than a wing and a prayer – I’ll be needing a 737 and a full house at Lincoln cathedral to get me through this one. Exams are so false. It’s not an assessment of my ability to understand the concepts of poststructuralism; the rethinking of the essential and the innate into the fluid and uncontainable, how knowledge is power and discursive practices replicate culturally specific control mechanisms not only through state and institution but how as individuals we reproduce our own repression through processes of monitoring, surveillance and self-regulation. No, it’s purely a memory test – and my memory is currently engaged – with other things. We need to address assessment. Reducing learning to recall by rote is not what higher education should be about. I’m being judged on my ability to memorise enough content to write (pen and paper???) for three hours in an exam room that’s horrifyingly like being back at school and I’m not happy 🙁

Exams should no longer been seen as effective methods of assessment; at least not unseen papers consisting of three essay type questions to be answered in three hours that cover a three month intense theoretical based course. I took one of these ‘bad experiences’ this week; at an exam centre I’d never been to before; it had with no car parking facilities, and was in the centre of York, over 50 miles from my home, all factors that added to the stress. The subject of the course was psychoanalytical and sociological theories of identity construction. It was helpful that this covered materials from the subject of my first MA in Gender Studies. I felt I had knowledge and understanding of the subject matter but knew from the start that when it came to an exam, then recall was going to be a problem. I’m taking an MA in Open and Distance Education with the OU and their study materials are excellent. I read the preparation for exams booklet from front to back, followed a revision plan and drew the mind maps that suited my visual learning style. But an hour into the exam and I knew that I couldn’t ‘remember’ any more than I’d already made notes on. It was like my memory was saying enough is enough and had shut down. I could see my diagrams in my head, the shapes and the colours, but not the text. I don’t know if this is a learning disorder, early Alzheimer’s or a symptom of a heavy work load that regularly extends into evenings and weekends. What I do know is that it felt like an unfair assessment of my ability, and I felt discriminated against by a mode of assessment that for me just doesn’t reflect my knowledge and understanding or allow me to do myself justice. I would be very interested in other people’s response to this.

Tag: assessment

testing, testing, testing….

Exams are unfair modes of assessment; discuss.