I’ve been quiet this week. Partially it’s because I don’t want to burn through my ESH hours too fast (I still want to write my blog, after all), and partially it’s because of Finals Week.
I don’t like Finals Week.
Yeah, I know that it’s an evaluation of everything we’ve learned over the last semester, but I think it has the capability of hurting us more than it helps us. Students have to spend long hours studying multiple topics, and then have to keep all those topics in order in time for essays, papers and tests. What’s wrong with that? Well, in the process of learning all this, we have to sacrifice such things as sleep in order to make sure that we get everything ready, and when the time comes we forget half the things we were supposed to know. Thus, we fail, and when we fail it makes us look bad and no one will hire us for jobs later in life, and it makes the college look bad because a whole bunch of students failed.
…
That might be a bit excessive.
I think it stems from America’s obsession over tests. We’re always testing things, and making a list of the things we test would take way too long. This is a bigger problem with lower level education, but what it boils down to is that we focus so much on the tests that we lose track of what we’re really supposed to be teaching our students. Shouldn’t the focus be more on getting good content to our students rather than churning out test after test?
I’m no teacher, but maybe excessive testing isn’t really a good thing. As evaluation, maybe, but as the benchmark, the deciding factor on whether or not we got a good education? No, it’s not good.
