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

Examinations seem to be one of the most important ways to measure student’s ability that are applied almost around the world. Some people hold the opinion that formal ‘pen and paper’ examinations are not the best method to determine educational achievement. From my perspective, I totally concur with this statement due to the following reasons.

To begin with, this kind of examination will not calibrate students’ ability accurately. I argue that this traditional test is seen to be predictable and that students can learn by heart at home before the test. For example, in almost every school in Viet Nam, each subject teacher will prepare for students many questions related to the exam and acquire them to brush up thoroughly. According to this, students can complete their own examinations and all of them will have the same result which does not evaluate their real capability. In addition, some students also have health conditions such as anxiety, stress during the test so that they can not display their examinations perfectly although they are even good at this subject.

Furthermore, ‘pen and paper’ examinations are also the easiest way to cheat. For instance, with the multiple - choice structure, test takers can take a glance at their next partner and do the same and this will not be equal to diligent ones who worked hard for the exams. In my opinion, there are various ways to assess students’ educational achievement like oral exams, make a speech which contains all the main ideas of lessons, do a project, etc. Thus, ‘pen and paper’ examinations should be reconsidered to quantify students’ aptitude.

In conclusion, with the above-mentioned reasons, I believe that the government should have another way to appraise the whole education achievement in the future instead of ‘pen and paper’ examinations.