By The People

Education: Testing, Testing…

I have been in several educational frameworks over the years: from a verkrampte convent to a liberal farm school, from a snotty Milner outpost in Gauteng to a faceless university and then an arrogant professional society. Some were good, some bad and some downright standard. One thing they all had in common though, was an inexplicable deference to the concept of the examination.

What is it about the exam that holds educators in such thrall?

I remember starting at one school to be told there was a French exam that morning.

‘No problem,’ I said to my new teacher, amiably enough. ‘I have never done French though, so, I’ll just sit in the library then?’

‘Oh no, no, my dear,’ the teacher looked at me smugly, as if she had just managed to prevent me from getting away with something somehow lazy or wicked. ‘This is the perfect way to find out what you know about French. I have your paper all ready.’

‘But I can just tell you what I know about French,’ I protested whilst being dragged to a desk all neatly aligned with others. ‘ Nada. Seriously.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a worrywart,’ sing-songed the teacher. ‘I am sure you’ll do fine. Got a pen? Right? begin!’

I then proceeded to spend two full hours staring down at a bunch of meaningless characters, pondering the question: how long has it been since that woman actually listened to what she was saying? When did the process of testing learners begin to outweigh teaching them?

That was when I was thirteen. At twenty-three I found myself in a six-hour conveyancing exam, staring at a question requiring me to write out an entire six-page mortgage bond document. From memory.

The scariest thing was that I, like everyone else in the room, could make a passable stab at it, simply because we had all sat for hours upon hours, over days and days, parroting such documents aloud to ourselves in a sing-song rote learning fashion. Did this make us smart? I spent a large chunk of those six hours wondering if in fact, it made us the thickest people in the city – to have got ourselves in the position where such bovine memory-nastics were required of us.

I have sat in an exam on ethics, surrounded by people cheating. I have sat in a physics exam, regurgitating formula after formula, not thinking about science at all but rather worrying that the information I was spewing forth would not be purged from my brain by the end of the session, as then there would be no space in my short term memory for the history date absorption scheduled for that night.

I have also made full use of all the exam tricks at my disposal. I have bought Bioplus by the crate. I have spotted myself blue in the face, leaving vast tracts of syllabus entirely untouched. I have written three-page essays on absolutely nothing at all, confident in the knowledge that almost all educators will give at least 30% to an essay of that length, regardless of its content (an important corollary to the spotting technique).

While I didn’t ever technically cheat? I look back on exam techniques like that and ask myself: how are they any different from taking in a handful of notes with you? Why is it so much more honourable to be able to stuff a fistful of knowledge, that you know full well is going to be lost within days, into your brain rather than into your pocket?

Now, at thirty, I find myself with a Matric, two degrees and two professional qualifications behind me. What do I have, intellectually, to show for it? I know that a rhizome is an underground stem. I know that mass times acceleration equals force – but I don’t know what that means. I know Bartholomew Diaz was a sailor who had something to do with spices. I know that Justinian was an important, possibly Roman, jurist and I know that our constitution has a nifty preamble about ubuntu.

Most importantly though, I know that it takes three days and nights, with toilet breaks, to get a lever-arch file of fact-based information into my head, and that at least 65% of that information can stay in my short-term memory for a three-day period.

I do like the fact that I can read and write. I know I have been privileged to have been given access to so much information and I believe that my education has given me a confidence in my ability to think and retain information, which I would not otherwise have – and that confidence is a very useful societal tool.

But now that my studying days are over – and believe me, if there was anything I learnt from regurgitating a bond document in legalese during that conveyancing exam, it was that such a level of absurdity should close one’s formal education – I look back and think, what have I learnt?

I have learnt that money and access to information can buy you power over others. Oh! and I have learnt that exams are silly.