Direction: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Exams encourage students to learn. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer. |
While some people assert that exams are very important tool for measuring how good the lesson is and how much students understand, others say that exams have a negative effect forcing students to study only the important parts of the subject. I believe that exams encourage students to learn, because students concentrate on the class more eagerly. On top of that, they find out their strengths and weaknesses through the results of the exams and try to make up the weak points. First of all, the fact that they have to take an exam encourages students to become more involved in the lessons. That is, exams help learners to listen to the lectures carefully and give away with any other distractions to focus on the lessons. When I was a freshman, I have an elective course and a necessary course. In the elective course, instead of taking the midterm exam I just have to submit a report. So I did not give that class lots of efforts and even was absent from the class several times. In the final exam, however, I could not help staying up late several nights to catch up on the contents of the lesson. On the contrary, I studied hard to get a higher grade in the necessary course, being an active learner. I did not have any trouble understanding the whole lesson because I prepared almost perfectly. I saw for myself that exams are a good method for me to keep studying. What’s more, exams provide students much information how well they achieve the learning objectives. After taking exams, students verify their advantages and disadvantages in a certain subject through the analysis of the test results, and naturally they work on their faults. For an instance, there are three sections in a Word process test. Before I took the real test, I prepared the test by taking lots of trial tests. After several trial tests, I found out that I am bad at the last section of the test. So I spent much time on that section. I guess that due to the study of the results of the trial test I could more eagerly and effectively study the weak section. Accordingly, exams are very good conductor which urge me to cover my drawbacks. |