Oh, my beloved exams

Ah, how I cherish them… exams. Every semester ends with multiple of those atrocious stress-level-raising 90 minutes where you “show what you have learned”. As if it was that easy to define and measure what one “knows” about a complex subject.

Exams test more than the subject

What is being assessed in exams is not just the subject matter. There is also a random component: how well do I feel on that specific day, both physically and mentally? Maybe I suffer from a slight cold. Maybe a girl is having her period. Maybe the exam is taking place too early for me to get into a productive state of mind. Maybe it’s scheduled at a time of day where I’m most tired. Maybe the lighting conditions in the room are subpar or the air quality leaves much to be desired.

Exams are also about how well I fit into a system: how well can I concentrate during a specific, short period of time, without being distracted by the fact that 200 people are in the same room? And how quickly can I think? I’m definitely not the fastest: I rather prefer taking my time in the absolute quiet. Thinking through one equation for one hour (or a lot more), making sure I really know where it is derived from, what its context is, what the boundary conditions are, what space my variables even live in, and what the formula is useful for. In an overpaced world, I find joy in investing time to deeply understand a topic, maybe draw connections to other things I’ve learned about and simply mess around and engage with the content in a playful, happy-go-lucky attitude.

I doubt major scientific results are conceived and written down in 90 minutes. Sometimes it takes centuries, brilliant minds and a diversity of cultures to find a solution to an old problem, especially in math. But of course, exams don’t require you to win the nobel price and are designed to be finishable in the proposed timeframe, you might retort. Well, yes (in case you fit into the system), but at the cost of exercises that don’t actually have much to do with what would be really meaningful to know about if you wanted to pursue your studies in this area or work in a research team afterwards.

Instead, you are requested to painstakingly apply an algorithm like Gaussian elimination, memorized by heart, when writing a simple 10-line Python program would spare you to go through each annoying and mostly uninstructive calculation by hand. It’s of course vital to understand how Gaussian elimination works. And it’s no harm carrying it out a few times by hand on paper to grasp the algorithm. But then, I don’t see the use of reiterating it over and over again for new numbers. For sure, this is a very specific example, but think about how many exam exercises just require you to apply an algorithm (like Hund’s rule) or to plug numbers into your calculator.

“Learn for life”

Furthermore, exams come with the ugly side-effect of reinforcing human laziness in a rather sad way: although teachers always emphasize they want us to “learn for life”, in the end, you still have to pass the exam. And probably want to get a good grade too in this competitive society. So you still have to study for the exam. The subject becomes a means to an end. A mentality that even spreads to teachers randomly telling you that this part of the course is or is not relevant for the test. There is even a proper German word for this, “klausurrelevant” (potentially on the test), and I’m mildly allergic to it.

Learning for the exam also means preparing for the oftentimes far-fetched questions by optimizing your pattern recognition to quickly identify them and write down the answer you remembered (or have noted on your legal cheat sheet) from one of the acquired exams from past years, from which many questions will be recycled. Which is why there is often secrecy surrounding these old exams and why professors don’t want to hand them out (again, it reinforces human laziness). But overfitted models are of no use for anybody, and overfitted students neither. That is not to say that there are certainly very smart people who also excel in exams without overfitting the training data (past exams). My point is rather that the set of smart students and that of students who excel in exams do not at all have to coincide. Not performing well in an exam does not at all mean you’re stupid, learned nothing about the subject, or that you are a “bad person”.

Competition

This brings us to another effect (or rather origin?) of exams: competition. It’s all about measuring human performance. But the method doesn’t sound too human after all. It attempts to describe your humanness in a measly number: a grade. Thereby, it crates a narrative of “better” and “worse”. Even though nobody might come to you and say “look how great I am with my 1.0”¹, you might still feel of not equal value by your self-imposed thoughts dictated by society.

In Germany, there is also the common practice of “gaußen”, which refers to the Gaussian distribution. Instead of an absolute grading scale, it is adapted after the exam was written in order to make sure fewer students receive very good or very poor marks and that most stay in a middle range. In other words, the grade distribution is adjusted to fit a normal distribution. As a consequence, only relative performance counts: if your fellow students score very poorly (measured by the absolute points in the exam), you will receive a better grade. No wonder this can lead to adversarial environments. I’ve even heard stories about missing books in libraries during the exam period to put fellow students at a disadvantage. “Ellenbogengesellschaft” (elbow society) is actually quite accurate as term (think of pushing others aside with your elbows in a ruthless attitude to get ahead).

Not to say that a bit of competition can actually foster a growth mindset and also be fun. Ultimately, science is about pushing forward, to unknown lands that wouldn’t have been deemed within reach yesterday. And maybe, the initial spark to get the ball rolling is the vision of achieving better results than this other research group, or even selfishly, of getting more recognition as person and scientist. But even though this is also comparative thinking, you are in a different position as scientist working in a research group than a student in their second Bachelor’s semester: you actually work on a scientific problem. And there is obviously more than just better performance on a particular question that can affirm you and give you a feeling of actually contributing something.

But the student only sees the grades as direct outcome. Competition might push you to achieve “better” results, but it bears the high risk of destabilizing talented souls by forcing upon them (from early on) a binary mindset of “good grades = success”, “bad grades = failure”. I mean, we even say “to fail an exam”. This creates pressure that can lead to psychosomatic symptoms, if not depression.

Exams may be a good incentive to work towards a goal for some. I also like deadlines (even just my owns) to get the ball rolling. But for me at least, exams create a more tense and thus less enjoyable learning atmosphere, always with that nagging feeling that you might be blocking your future if you don’t pass or don’t get “good” grades. I’d much rather live in a world where we learn for the sake of learning: because we’re enthusiastic about a subject and are actually interested in it, not just the exam.

Why exams?

We have to ask ourselves if exams are really a good way to measure human performance. Maybe we should go further and challenge the concept of “human performance” in and of itself. What is the goal of exams and grades in the first place? To provide a way to classify and rank people during the application process? Is it clear that somebody who didn’t achieve a 1.0 in their A levels cannot be a good medic? What does a single number, even if averaged over multiple grades, really tell about a human, their past, and their know-how in a certain field? Some scholarships strictly require you to be among the top 10% of students in your degree in order to even apply. I just hope that companies realize that there is more than grades. And what about academia? The reality is that with a 2.x¹ master, you will likely encounter significantly more difficulties than someone who graduated with a grade where a “1” precedes the decimal point.

The whole machinery and cultural burden around exams profoundly disappoints me. As best as I can, I have learned to live and deal with it, trying to take grades not that seriously anymore and putting more emphasis on learning for the beauty and joy of it. But of course, this is difficult when, despite teachers regurgitating how important it is to “learn for life”, grades still dictate what waters one can venture into later on. Nobody wants to blow their chances, so grades remain important.

I hope recruiters, be it in a company, or as a PI of a research group, will not only put their focus on grades, but approach the person with dignity as a human being, worth way more than what a single number could ever express. Personal projects, the eagerness to grow, soft skills, and side quests into topics that go beyond exams should be valued just as much, if not more. I’d love to see more alternative methods of examination like 3-week deep-dive reports. But maybe we should also question the concept of “grades” and ask ourselves if they are not a remnant of darker times worth getting rid of in favor of a more relaxed and playful learning atmosphere fostering a sense of team spirit (while allowing for competition-like aspects), responsibility and real excitement for the subject at hand.

Thanks to Talia and Nils for their helpful feedback.