David J Rice

Aside from it being overcast, rainy and dark the only thing that makes this month better is that it’s exam month! Oh and guess what, this year Queen’s sent me a birthday present. What is it? oh it’s just an invitation to an exam at 9:30am on my birthday, and an IOU for another 3 days later… Wow you must have been stoked! Okay I promise I’ll stop it with the sarcasm for now.

Primarily I see them as pointless, they mainly test the amount of random factoids one can remember about a chosen subject and rarely do they test understanding. Everyone hate’s exams, but there’s no alternative… right? Well I had thought the very same thing until just recently when I had a chat with a good friend of mine who’s studying over at MIT in Boston.

They don’t have any exams at all for final year, each module has a practical project that is to be completed and is then marked with a letter grade (A through G or similar). All of the grades are assigned a weighting and people achieve degree classifications based on performance against other students in the class.

While the actual system might work slightly different (we were out for some festive drinks and I may not recall all of the details :)) it is still a marked improvement on the exam format.

I think a world without exams would be a better place, what do you think?