Methods of measuring learning in educational settings

Topic: Many people believe that formal 'pen and paper' examinations are not the best method of assessing educational achievement. What is your view of examinations?

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'pen and paper' examinations?

Examinations have always been one of the most familiar methods of measuring learning in educational settings throughout the world. At virtually every stage of studying process, students need to take exams to verify whether they are qualified to move on to the next level. In my view, I believed that there are some points of traditional examinations should be reconsidered.

There are clearly certain advantages of exams. They guarantee the equality by enforcing the same condition on all the candidates. Moreover, they have the comparatively abundant types of exam questions, for instance, multiple choice questions or essay tasks can test different sorts of capability. However, examinations still have drawbacks. With the growth in cram school, students tend to be test-wise rather than to truly learn. Although this kind of student does not have the fundamental knowledge or skills, they still acquire the good result. In contrast, some test-takers perform poorly simply because of nervousness. Furthermore, some teachers and students only focus on those aspects of the curriculum that are liable to be tested, or those repetitive ones, thus excluding the unnecessary parts.

A number of measures should be carried out to tackle the defects. Wherever possible, exams should properly reflect the educational program. Exam tasks should be comprehensively varied in term of theory in order to completely assess throughout various of knowledge and skills. Moreover, other types of evaluation should also be considered, for example, independent studying, research skills or teamwork ability.

In spite of its shortcomings, exams still play an important role in assuring the appropriate, objective assessment. Nevertheless, to gain more advantages, it should be carefully designed and supplement with other types of assessment.

@chocuatt
Hi,
I think that you have good viewpoints, but the order of the each paragraph is not really clear.
I suggest the outline should be: Opening => Advantages of exams => Dis advantages => Your personal opinion and suggestions => Ending.
By this way, each viewpoint will be further discussed and that makes the essay more persuasive.
Hope my comment useful for you.

@chocuatt
I think you have good ideas, but the way you laid out your paragraphs is not clear and logical, sometimes I find it confusing when I read it. I think if you are more well-organized, your essay will be more perfect.

1) The introduction is clear enough, your ideas for the essay are great and performed in a way that people can easily track.

2) In my view, I believed that there are ...

3) 'abundant' has negative meaning that does not fit your opinion.

4) Although this kind of student does not ... => These 2 do not really match. Though I can understand what you are getting at, you should change the way you write it.

5) thus excluding the unnecessary parts.

6) The topic ask for your opinions, not solutions, so the third paragraph seem to be abundant.

7) Your essay is kinda short due to the fact that you gather the pros and cons in just one body paragraph. Instead, you actually ought to divide the ideas into 2 body paragraphs, 1 for the advantages, 1 for the others. In each one, you have to introduce your topic sentence first, which means giving your opinion in general, then explain further and give examples. Your current work is lack of order.

8) For the conclusion part, you need to paraphrase the topic again and then can suggest some solutions.

Nguyen, you are only being asked for your opinion about exams. Therefore, there was no requirement for you to have presented those alternatives to exams in the essay. That is, unless you did not provide the complete prompt for me to consider? In which case, the advice I will give you will either be incomplete, irrelevant, or simply wrong. In the essay that you wrote, you should have simply separated the various topics that you chose to discuss in little developed sentences in the second paragraph. You had more than enough information in there to be able to complete the 3 body of paragraphs required for the essay. Don't forget, you only get 5 sentences per paragraph. So when you discuss more than 5 sentences using various topics in one paragraph, you are ensuring that you get the lowest possible cohesiveness and cohesion score that you can get. That is not what you want to do. Aim to discuss each topic in a separate paragraph in order to gain a higher possible score for the relevant portions of the test. Basically, this is a half-baked essay that would not get you a very good score in the end.