Where your future can be determined by a grade on a piece of paper.
It can hinder learning drive by making you unwilling to venture outside the syllabus, which makes you lose agency, and cause memory interference...
It can hinder sleep because you are stressed, especially since the education system repeatedly promotes that you need good grades for examinations.
Exam learning focuses on memorisation because one will be forced to recall information without any cues other than the questions, and you have to adapt to the mark scheme’s strictness, and bluntly speaking, it can get tedious really quickly.
And also lots of past papers grinding and elimination of mistakes to the highest level of repetition. Much slower than when you are learning something for the sake of interest, at the very least, because there is no need to memorise everything.
Some people may say: There’s no clear end. The hurdle to start is pretty high! Though it’s more long-term. Are they scared of failures and time/energy opportunity costs?
And I get them. It's pretty nihilistic after all. Perhaps it’s because it’s a classic labor-more, get-more scenario, plus it’s easy to understand, plus I’ve lived this life long, plus other students can relate to this.
For some people, here are the potential (in fact, very likely) cognitive effects of a standardised examination system:
The brain would
become so bored that it really cannot endure it for long, leading to
confusion about why a person cannot persistently and continually revise
for regular amounts of time, causing stress and panic amongst themselves.
They might also feel sad as their life is basically shaped to the point
that they are a slave to the exam board. Rather, it's essentially so
forced that there is no other way to continue on the career of a
"modern" life.
They try to "gamify" studying with "group studying" and such...
In the end, people self-blame even after watching tons of motivational videos
about discipline and such. There needs to be a work-life balance.
However, the efforts of doing something one likes and one hates for a
set period of time is not proportional. They get blamed by parents or
teachers for gaming more than studying... It causes stress about not only themselves,
but also their future, when the brain has not adapted to this... It's just so bad. I
barely even have words.
That a computer hard drive has more value than the candidates (if
only it were allowed) - because exams do test arbitrary knowledge, guys!
Not stuff that is useful irl.
This is also the link to the fact humans feel pain when in boredom,
possibly at school,
drilling past
papers... and they wish to not feel the pain and be a zombie or
robot. in that situation. I was about to say how self-degrading it was,
but it indeed IS the case that boredom DOES cause pain, so it's a
totally valid point!
The idea that exerting more effort will bring about more grades... it's somewhat true... To outsiders, it might not seem that rational to sacrifice a life to marginally boost exam grades, but when it dictates universities, jobs, etc. The stakes are just way too high - this is what happens when a system is high-impact and zero-sum, in which there are limited job or university placements, so some people will inevitably have to lose.
Highlights common candidate flaws and actually explains the harder questions.
Category:Examinations Category:Education Category:Psychology