The point of exams is too see how ‘smart’ someone is. However, due to the amount of pressure and stress they put on students, it means people can’t perform to their best ability. 

Measuring a student’s intelligence should not be based off one test. It should be their all rounder performance. Their future shouldn’t be decided from one day. 

Also many students find particular school subjects challenging and find that they excel in creative aspects or social skills instead of trigonometry in maths. 

When students are faced with an exam, their stress levels rapidly increase, making the exam hall a bad environment for them. High stress can also lead to headaches and nausea leading to people not being able to complete the exam as well as they would like to. Studies show that school exams continue to not properly test the ability of our knowledge, instead they actually have negative impacts on our lives e.g bad mental health due to worrying about a exam.

Some school students (year 10) were asked about their thoughts on exams. Natalia Warren says that ‘like many others, I don’t cope well under pressure meaning that my exams don’t reflect my class work at all.’ Georgie Whiting also stated that she is more of a ‘creative person and struggles to remember certain facts’ and at the end of the day she thinks ‘exams are just about how much can you remember.’ 

Exams shouldn’t determine students levels of intelligence, therefore they should be another method of seeing everyone’s abilities. 

Do you think school exams effectively test today’s students?