This Sunday evening I take the text for my sermon from a piece about examinations by Katie Stripe in the Times Higher about examinations:
Testing students’ ability to show their learning in a closed context is not preparing them for a future in which technology is ubiquitous. There are few professional contexts that require you to recall information in a specific time frame.
I agree to some extent with the conclusion of the article but for different reasons. In particular, I don’t think this conclusion has much to do with the arrival of new technologies such as ChatGPT. Exams that simply require the students to “recall information” and nothing else seem to me to be of limited value from an educational point of view and should indeed be scrapped, but I think exams can play a role in testing other, more important, skills such as problem-solving.
Over my lifetime the ratio of assessment to education in universities has risen sharply, with the undeniable result that academic standards have fallen especially in my own discipline of physics. The modular system encourages students to think of modules as little bit-sized bits of education to be consumed and then forgotten. Instead of learning to rely on their brains to solve problems, students tend to approach learning by memorizing chunks of their notes and regurgitating them in the exam. I find it very sad when students ask me what derivations they should memorize to prepare for examinations because that seems to imply that they think their brain is no more than a device for storing information. It became clear to me over the years that school education in the UK does not do enough to encourage students to develop their all-round intellectual potential, which means that very few have confidence in their ability to do anything other than remember things. It seems the same malaise affects the Irish system too.
On the other hand, a good memory is undoubtedly an extremely important asset in its own right.
I went to a traditional Grammar school that I feel provided me with a very good education in which rote learning played a significant part. Learning vocabulary and grammar was an essential part of their approach to foreign languages, for example. How can one learn Latin without knowing the correct declensions for nouns and conjugations for verbs? But although these basic elements are necessary, however, they are not sufficient. You need other aspects of your mental capacity to comprehend, translate or compose meaningful pieces of text.
The same considerations apply to STEM disciplines. It is important to have a basic knowledge of the essential elements of mathematics and physics as a grounding, but you also need to develop the skill to apply these in unusual settings. I also think it’s simplistic to think of memory and creative intelligence as entirely separate things. I seems to me that the latter feeds off the former in a very complex way. A good memory does give you rapid access to information, which means you can do many things more quickly than if you had to keep looking stuff up, but I think there’s a lot more to it than that. Our memories are an essential part of the overall functioning of our brain, which is not compartmentalized in such a simple way. For example, one aspect of problem-solving skill relies on the ability to see hidden connections; the brain’s own filing system plays a key role in this.
In recognizing the importance of memory I don’t mean that rote learning is necessarily the best way to develop the relevant skills. My own powers of recall are not great – and are certainly not improving with age – but I find I can remember things much better if I find them interesting and/or if I can see the point of remembering them and/or if I use them a lot. Remembering things because they’re memorable is far easier than remembering because you need to remember them to pass an examination!
Anyway, my point is that a good memory can help you learn, but is not in itself what should be assessed in an examination. I wish universities made more effort to educate students to understand that their brain can be much more than a memory device.
Here endeth the lesson.
In the Dark 
