Why I hate making exams

This is the time again to suffer the insufferable. Of course, I hate exams. I hate taking them, I hate making them. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it is a pointless exercise and a waste of time, a boorish ceremonial practice of self-assurance.

This is not to undermine the intellectual benefit of exams. Indeed, due to them people have found themselves able to transform a minute-long glance of their notes into an ineffable and vivid short term memory, awaiting its release. (And fade away thereafter). It is a challenging cognitive process perceived to reveal the solemn “contents” of the mind. 

Yes, contents. For exams are seen as a time when what is inside the students’ head is checked and measured.

Here, we see a fundamental assumption: teaching is putting something inside a mind and learning is consuming and containing what has been put in. It only reveals our materialism in education. We model the human brain according to objects, because only objects are literally capable of containing anything.

Not even the ancients conceive of learning in this way. Instead of containing, a predominant concept is “inhering.” For example, we hear them speak of intelligence (the logos) that orders the universe as “inherent” in the things themselves, animating and orchestrating them according to one universal order. The mind is the mirror of this cosmic consciousness, a microcosm that contains the essence of the human being. No, it does not speak of the “cognitive” or the “intellectual” alone, for the ancient notion of mind speaks of a principle that orders the whole organism. Thus mind is “psyche” which means soul, the principle of life.

The concept of learning is not that of putting something in the mind. That would be a contradiction, for the mind is already a whole or rather the fountain of the entire being of a person. Learning is rather re-awakening of what is already there. Hence, we have Plato saying “learning is remembering.”

Instead of exams, the ancients have test. We today tend to conflate these two words together. But they are actually different. Whereas an exam is intended to retrieve what has been put inside, a test is about unleashing what is already inside. A person tested is confronted by the task to make the best of what he has to meet the present challenge.

It is only in modernity that for the first time “mind” has become analogous to a “container.” It assumes that at the beginning it is nothing, for it has nothing inside. To exist it needs to be filled by the contents of the outside world. So it ceased to be a principle of being, and became rather a principle of consuming, of having. The modern philosopher John Locke describes mind succinctly as a “tabula rasa” (blank slate). Adjudged by its content, the exam, the tool to measure what is inside, is born.

But if exams are intended to measure the contents of the mind, isn’t it a hopeless exercise for someone who put it there to do a question-begging task of administering it? For then he would just be seeing what he already knew he would be seeing.

And lazy teachers like myself only get the frustration of not seeing much. Is it because the container is broken? Or is it maybe because in the first place, the mind does not contain?

I think schools must stop administering exams. Why not just ask a student to create something out of what he learned? But if the schools do that, I won't get paid, because how could they now collect fees?