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Do exams measure anything worth measuring? A view from the bac philo

Khady Sène Fellow
· 5 replies
EducationAfrican & AfricanaChineseIslamicAl-GhazaliSocratesWang Yangming#assessment#decolonising-curriculum#examinations#purpose-of-education
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Exam season is coming round again in Dakar. In June my students sit four hours to write a dissertation on a subject of the kind "Is it reasonable to fear death?", "Can one be free without laws?", and so on. The exam is one of the rites of passage of the French-speaking world.

I have marked hundreds of these scripts. The marking scheme rewards a recognisable form: an introduction that "problematises", a plan in two or three parts, a conclusion that answers. Students who master the form score well. Some of them can do the form without having thought anything. Some of my most thoughtful students fail to fit their thinking into it.

So I find myself asking the question in the title, which is really a question about purpose. If education is transmission, an exam tests whether the transmission arrived. If it is formation of a free mind, I am not sure what an exam could test. Socrates never examined anyone in this sense, unless you count the examination that got him killed. Al-Ghazali warned against seeking knowledge for status and disputation. And the Chinese imperial system examined people for centuries.

Is there an argument that a good examination measures something genuinely worth having, beyond the ability to pass it? Or is assessment always a compromise with institutions? I would love answers from other teachers and other traditions.

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5 answers

  1. Lin Pei-shan

    Fellow

    The Chinese imperial examinations are the cautionary tale everyone cites. By the Ming the "eight-legged essay" required a rigid structure of parallel sections, and critics then and since said it trained form at the expense of thought. Wang Yangming himself failed the highest examination more than once before passing. His later teaching that knowing and acting are one can be read partly as a protest against a system that rewarded knowing-about.

    And yet the system also gave poor but gifted men a route into government. An exam is a crude instrument, but sometimes the alternative is patronage.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Al-Ghazali's warning is sharper than a dislike of exams. In the book on knowledge in the Ihya' he attacks scholars who learned in order to win debates and gain posts, and in his short letter to a disciple he says, roughly, that knowledge without action is a kind of madness and action without knowledge is empty. His test of learning was what it did to the learner's conduct. No examination board I know of tests that, and maybe none should try.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Sam Ellery

    Fellow

    Yes, judges reward form, and kids learn to game it; I see it at tournaments every weekend. But I've come to think form isn't nothing. A student who can reliably structure an argument, anticipate an objection and land a conclusion under time pressure has learned something real. Goodhart's warning applies, a measure that becomes a target stops measuring well, but the answer may be to rotate the targets rather than abolish measurement.

  4. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    In Italy the maturità includes an oral examination, and I find it measures something the written paper cannot: whether a student can think when interrupted. A dissertation can be rehearsed. A conversation, if the examiner is honest, cannot. If you want to test formation rather than transmission, I think you need a person in front of a person.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Khady Sène

    Fellow

    I am struck that each of you defends the exam for a different reason: access (Pei-shan), structure (Sam), conversation (Giulia). Bilal is the only one who says the important thing cannot be tested at all.

    I will be honest about my own conflict. The three-part plan came to Senegal with the French school, and part of me resents it. Another part has watched it give my students a tool that French students take for granted. I think I will keep teaching it and tell them openly that it is a tool, not a mind.

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