Life is an Exam

Life is an exam, or not. All my life, or at least my early years of life, I have been prepping for exams very year. In Malaysia there is the primary school exams (UPSR) that determines whether you can go to a boarding school with better facilities and reputed more experienced teachers. There you prepare for a mid high school, PMR, that does nothing much, before the next biggest exams,SPM, which determines whether you can get a scholarship to a university or not. As you can see, all these acronyms of examinations (UPSR > PMR > SPM) creates a very exam oriented education system. There’s also the bi-annual exam in between. So exams have been there since as far as I can remember and education to me has always been about exams.

Now while working, there are also professional exams, which requires preparation and learning. But I can see and am slowly convinced that exams is not the result of learning. It is the understanding. I can see people who joined study groups that do so without thinking much about exams, or even considering taking exams. The discussions during these sessions also are less focused on “what will be in the exams”, but more towards understanding what the lessons is about.

But, there’s always a but, one of the easiest ways to gauge understanding is by questioning back what has been discussed. In daily work, this is sometimes in informal chats and also in meetings. However if the time is limited and there are a lot of ’gauging’ to be done, how would this be achieved? Hence comes the examinations.

Of course there are other ways where people can show their competency through their work and experience but I think one of the reasons exams still exist is that it is fastest to be done with less cost on the examining body.

So yeah, I need to go do revision for my exams, since they are not going away anytime soon.

Thank you for reading.