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Do you think exams are a good way to determine your intelligence?

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Original post by Bassetts
The people who say exams are a test of your memory don't know what they're talking about. Exams are a test of your understanding of what you've been taught and how you can apply it to different and potentially unknown situations. If exams were just a test of memory, they'd be piss easy and I'd get 100% every time.


Ok, if you were to sit an exam in a subject you didn't study, and your peroration was to go through all of the mark schemes, and learn each of the answers for each of the questions, then to go through the exam recommended text book and learn all of it, without understanding the key concepts, I would argue that reciting the key definitions, ideal answers would earn you a large enough pre portion of the marks to give you a good passing grade. I am not saying that exams are all learning, but you can get through them without understanding what you are learning.

Take particle physics for example- you could learn that a positive kaon has +1 strangeness, and that it has 2 quarks, and it is a meson, and it is a hadron, and it interacts due to the strong force, and when it comes up in the exam with a question asking you "if k- has -1 strangeness, what is the strangeness of k+?", you could answer the question without understanding that k- is a antiparticle of k+, and therefore has opposite strangeness, yet the same mass.

However, SOME questions apparently require understanding, like "explain why the enthalpy of formation of CO2 is the same as the enthalpy of combustion of C", which you have to understand that it is the same equation, unless you learn a specific answer to said question, without understanding why.

I agree that some questions require insight, but that does not discredit my statement that one can sit and pass an exam well without understanding the key concepts.
Noo they dont!!! I hate them!! We dont even need the things we take in exams for life. Its just a way of stressing out students.:angry::dontknow::sigh:
We should have a small exam at the year that is RELEVANT for us and they can atleast tell us what is going to be on the exam right? That way we can study the material and be prepared. This education system sometimes sucks.

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Original post by Auditore014
I have been recently thinking about exams and if they are really effective in assessing your intellect. For example, one of the issues is that if you are 1 mark away from an A* (or other types of topmost grades), it doesn't make you less clever. If you think exams are a ineffective, why and what would you do as a replacement?

Just curious, thanks.


I think grades can be reflective of three things: competence in a subject, time spent revising, and "natural intelligence" (whatever the hell that is). For instance, someone very "naturally intelligent" could have spent 0 time studying the subject and 0 time preparing for the exam and then got a bad grade if you gave a Trinity mathmo (who only speaks English) an Arabic grammar test, I doubt they'd do very well.

Exams have their value (I'd be very queasy about letting a doctor who's never passed an exam operating on me), but I don't think they're the be-all and end-all.

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