Why Exams Are Important

By TAPTI SEN ’21

With exams on the horizon, everybody’s stress levels are a little higher than usual, even without considering the sports, extracurriculars, and other activities everyone is juggling. With all this impending pressure,I’m not surprised that I’ve heard many people argue that we shouldn’t have exams. Though I am tempted to agree with them, I think that midterms are important for students to go through, especially high school students.

In Bangladesh, from fourth grade onwards, we had two exams every year, once in the winter and once in the summer. These exams were worth 50% of our grade, which seems like a lot compared to Milton’s 20%. Not surprisingly, we dreaded exam season every year. However, looking back on it, I think this was an important experience to go through. We learned how to create study schedules and plan study groups. These exams taught us how to study.  Having taken many exams in my life, I’ve learned to focus on my own work and not be distracted by noises around me, such as people’s sniffling and finger tapping. No matter how hard you study for an exam, you can never quite study how to take an exam. Exams are stressful, but honestly, that stress is something that we’ll have to go through again and again in our lives. At some point, we’ll need to take exams, whether it’s standardized tests or in college. It’ll be much less stressful overall if we’ve already had the experience of taking an exam, rather than going in completely blind.

Milton’s project-based system in place of final exams has its own benefits, but I also think that there are separate benefits to having final exams. Final exams set the tone for the year, in a way. They’re a good way to review all the material you’ve learned over the year and a sign of how much you’ve actually understood. It’s like a clean slate. You’ve understood all the mistakes you’ve made over the semester, and the exam is the way of proving to your teacher that you really do know all the material thoroughly. It is very unlikely that a student who has gotten A’s all year will fail the exams, but if someone is teetering on the edge of another grade, the final exams can help save their grade.

One argument against having exams is that the tests don’t truly help you review anything because it’s often just pure memorization. You just forget all the material you learn after exams are over. On the other hand, I think that knowing how to memorize something is a relatively useful skill to have. After all, we memorize things all the time; we just don’t realize it because it becomes ingrained into our brain. In the end, the pros of exams outweigh the cons. Exams are beneficial to students today.