Are Our Exams Outdated? Yes!

THE EXAM

This was my history final exam today. As you can see my students were neatly aligned in their rows. This
may seems like a normal procedure but it got my co-worker and me thinking. How do we evaluate our students in a new age where collaboration and group work are the focus? Why do we use this model? My co-worker, Kirk Upton, mentioned that this is an industrial style of assessment. A model that does not correlate to the current collaborative model that our school is attempting to integrate due to our new strategic plan. Our methods of assessment focus on the individual and their ability to recall information rather than the skills learned through projects and authentic assessment.

THE PROBLEM

As the students sat to take their exam in the alloted 2 and 1/2 hours, you could see the anguish in their faces. Do we assess our students in order to torment them? No, then why make them suffer through an exam of recall when we are charged with preparing our students for what is beyond our walls. If we maintain our methods of assessment despite our need to move toward a collaborative model, we are doomed to push our students away from inquiry and learning. If we are faced with a flatten world, where our students are going to be competing with students in India and China, how do we prepare them for a more competitive global marketplace? Is it by having them take an exam like this? We must seriously reevaluate how we teach and assess our students as their success depends upon it.

THE SOLUTION

While this post will only create more questions than answers, I do believe that one method of assessment that would work is the portfolio. If our students were to keep portfolios of their work and would be assessed upon their improvement, wouldn't that be much more rewarding than having them sit at a desk and answer multiple choice for 2 and 1/2 hours?

There are more questions than answers but this is an interesting topic to start this blog.