Reading through random education blogs I found an interesting post about exam stress. It has been a topic of discussion for more than a decade, yet it hasn't progressed anywhere. While reading the blog, I got this weird idea of why exams always have to be to answer the set of questions within a given time and why not exploring and extending the topics by asking unsolved questions.
It reminds me of a beautiful scene from an unpopular TV show, Genius by NatGeo. Albert Einstein as a student questions the theory that is being taught to him (Newton's laws of motion). His immediate action after asking the question is to pack his stuff and prepare to get out of the class assuming that he would be sent out of the class for questioning the authority. Instead his teacher asks him to be seated and appreciates his imagination.
In most of the astonishing discoveries and studies in all fields, there has always been a student who has had the guts to question the established results. However, modern education system's ideology has always been to supress imaginations and make the minds obey the authority. In fact, when I took a software job, my trainer has instructed me not be an Einstein or a Ramanujan but to be a person, who could learn whatever they teach and reproduce the same whenever the situation demanded.
In a popular speech by actor R. Madhavan at his famous Harvard speech, he mentions that exam is a measure to see how effectively one can recollect and reproduce a set of information under pressure. In a way, the format of exams is much similar to the expectations of a corporate job because over the years it is tailor made to fit the increasing demand for workforce. This exam pressure to find answers for questions within a given time kills the natural curiosity of students at a young age. There have been so many reforms taken to reduce the pressure off the exams. The formats of answers and the type of questions have also been changed. However, still the purpose of education (to generate workforce) hasn't changed.
The current exam system is reliable for easy evaluation and quantifying the reproducable knowledge of a student. But the imaginative power and curiosity can be tested (and evaluated) only by letting the students ask the questions. Maybe we haven't mapped the qualities of imagination and curiosity to any of the skills required for workforce yet. That doesn't conclude that establishing these skills would be unnecessary. Maybe we haven't found the right way to quantify these skills yet. That doesn't mean that they are not quantifiable. Maybe we haven't asked the right questions yet. Maybe we are still under the influence of established authority that we couldn't even consider the possibility of such an exam. Maybe our education system has to move beyond generating workforce. Maybe the role of an evaluator is only to admire at the intelligent line of thoughts of each student.
These uncertainties form a wall that block our sight beyond a sub-optimally working exam system. We could see beyond it only by climbing up the wall using the ladder of questions. There is still a long way to establish this new system but it has to begin somewhere in time.
