What's the point in learning all the content when less than a quarter is in the exam?

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What do you suggest? Maybe exams should be 10 hours long to cover everything? Even though only a small proportion of the curriculum is tested in an exam, I think how you perform in an exam is representative of your knowledge across the entire curriculum. For example, if you do well in an exam the chances are that you would have done well regardless of what came up, because the ones who do well revise the entire curriculum and are generally good across the entire curriculum. Of course there will be times when an exam only seems to have questions on topics that you are less familiar with, but I think that’s a bit unlucky and certainly isn’t the case for everyone. Bear in mind as well that studying a subject should not just be about passing the exams (of course that is a very important part), it’s more about the knowledge you acquire from it - at least that’s how I look at it. If the only thing you learned from studying a subject is how to pass the exams, then I think you failed overall.

It makes it so students get rewarded for working harder. If the syllabuses were as small as you infer they should be then the gap in marks between people who put in little effort and those who study alot would be a whole lot smaller than if they otherwise had to study a lot of content. Stop complaing and just see its made to reward people

Guessing this is a GCSE-tier question?

What do you suggest? Maybe exams should be 10 hours long to cover everything? Even though only a small proportion of the curriculum is tested in an exam, I think how you perform in an exam is representative of your knowledge across the entire curriculum. For example, if you do well in an exam the chances are that you would have done well regardless of what came up, because the ones who do well revise the entire curriculum and are generally good across the entire curriculum. Of course there will be times when an exam only seems to have questions on topics that you are less familiar with, but I think that’s a bit unlucky and certainly isn’t the case for everyone. Bear in mind as well that studying a subject should not just be about passing the exams (of course that is a very important part), it’s more about the knowledge you acquire from it - at least that’s how I look at it. If the only thing you learned from studying a subject is how to pass the exams, then I think you failed overall.

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We could split up the 10 hours in multiple papers, paper 1, 2 up to 10. I am not being sarcastic btw, testing them on everything will make it worth for the students who learn all the content or know other bits of the content, it will really give us a clear picture whether they are actually good in the subject or not. I am fine with the current system, but prefer this.

While that sounds good in theory, I don’t think it would work very well in practice. Can you imagine doing 10 hours of exams for each subject, especially at GCSE when you’re studying 10+ subjects - that’s over 100 hours of exams. Not only would this be physically and mentally exhausting for students, and it would need lots of invigilators and examiners marking all of the papers (which would be very expensive). And tbh, I don’t think it would discriminate between students any better than the current system. Like I said already, students who do well in exams will do well regardless of what comes up, and so I think 2-3 hour exams would discriminate between students just as well as 10 hour exams.

That's a very revealing comment about your attitude to learning - and in my experience, it's not just you.

The answer is that you're not learning 'to pass an exam' - you're supposed to be learning a subject so you understand more about something. You're increasing your knowledge base, increasing your learning and development, whether or not you're going to specifically use this knowledge in the future. You're not just 'doing it for an exam' - or you shouldn't be, anyway.

Well my question is about subjects you're not going to be learning further, so you won't be taking it further.

Of course I understand it if you're going to take the subject further, but otherwise what's the point if you're just going to forget it.

Furthermore, exams only test you on keywords and sentencing, you can be factually correct but if the words or sentences are not there, then no marks

That's a very revealing comment about your attitude to learning - and in my experience, it's not just you.

The answer is that you're not learning 'to pass an exam' - you're supposed to be learning a subject so you understand more about something. You're increasing your knowledge base, increasing your learning and development, whether or not you're going to specifically use this knowledge in the future. You're not just 'doing it for an exam' - or you shouldn't be, anyway.

Well my question is about subjects you're not going to be learning further, so you won't be taking it further.

Of course I understand it if you're going to take the subject further, but otherwise what's the point if you're just going to forget it, I mean, I did my GCSEs last year and I didn't take maths any further, but I had to learn everything anyhow, and I have forgotten mostly everything.