The clock sticks four in the morning. The whole dorm is quiet, and everyone is in bed except me. Under the strong light, my friend Brian looks gloomily at a huge pile of books because there is an unwelcome guest called "exam" saying good morning to him. Certainly, everyone must have this kind of studying experience similar to Brian. But the fact is that Brian remains silent toward examinations, for they are often regarded as the only reliable method to measure a student academic levels. However, he is totally wrong. In this essay, I would like to save Brian and discuss how the exams influence our education perniciously. In other words, exams should be abolished.
To begin with, it is obvious that the progress made in every field of study over the past thousand years is marvelous, but the methods of testing a person's knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It is disappointing that after all these years; educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than exams. People may claim that exams evaluate what you know, but it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. The reason is that the current educational system does not aim at students' quality, but only at developing their ability to perform well on the test. In this regard, exam may be a good means of testing memory, but they can tell you nothing person's true ability and aptitude.
Next, a good education should train students to think for themselves, yet the examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Meanwhile, exams do not motivate students to read widely, but to restrict his reading; exams also do not enable students to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. In a sense, students who get high scores are not necessarily those who have creativity and flexibility in dealing with various problems.
