Exams?

Monday 15 September, 2008

So it was just the other day last week when we finally got back our physics results. I scored a highly unexpected 19 out of 30. Like what the hell...a full 11 marks.

Flipping past the pages made me realize how so damn many of my marks were lost due to careless mistakes. Mistakes that included not calculating the area of the graph when they asked for it. Gosh...carelessness really can kill you.

But then at the very last question, there was this mistake I did which, up till now, I refuse to accept the reality of it. And so here's the question

(b) If the mass of the car is 4000kg, what is the resultant force on the car when it is braking to stop.
[Well basically the idea here is to find the gradient and that is the acceleration of the car]

So i read through my workings and found out that conceptually there was nothing wrong, but the presentation of my answer was what cost my marks...

Then it hit me.

Why are we still studying? Do we study to learn more about the facts around us, or do we study merely to answer this stack of papers with lots of redundant questions?

Back in the old times, I think people study because they want to learn, they are interested. I think.

But look at schools now. Filled with students....no...teenagers going just for the sake of it all. Teen pregnancy cases, under aged smoking. What does this show? And hell, what makes it worse is that we have this oh-so-big exams a.k.a. 'O' Levels at the end of next year, which is not a test of understanding and the ideas you know on the topic, but a test on how you answer the question(s).

So if you were to ask me, I'd still say that the government is wrong, and going to school is useless.

With that, I shall end here with a post of a fellow Singaporean which explains how we have been trained to tackle exams, and not the big questions in life.