Examinate, examinate

Exams are pretty much unavoidable if you want recognition for any form of education. Whether it's a food hygiene course or a university degree, there is bound to be at least one exam. Between May and July, students everywhere can't ignore that fact as they sit at individual desks in sports halls and classrooms across the country, trying to focus on the paper in front of them. Of course, I'm no exception.

At my university in London, everyone has around 8 exams, all approximately 2.5 hours long. If you're lucky, you have them all nicely spaced out over the whole of May; if you're like myself and a number of others on my course, you'll end up with a clump of three in,a row. Always helpful for knowing how to order and organise the revision.

The thing about exams is that I'm never very sure if they're the best way to test the knowledge we should have gained over the year. Sure, they're the easiest way to standardise marks and bulk assess but are the people who get good grades the people who will be the best employees or are they just the ones who are best at memorising and conforming to the system?

I'm not saying I have an alternative.far from it. Coursework can only test some areas and there simply not enough teachers for each student to be individually assessed over the year. However, with the age of the internet, you can find any journal article you need without searching the shelves of the library and a lot of text books are now ebooks, almost eradicating the need to step into a library or memorise facts quite so precisely. There's an ongoing debate whether this is making us lazy or just helping us focus more on what we're really interested in but I have to admit, I'm yet to use the university library for books...

Whatever your opinion on the accuracy of examinations, I think most people agree that they are stressful and unenjoyable. So, as I head home from exam 5 of 8 I'll ask you: is there another way to test our assimilation efficiency?