Many people believe that formal “pen and paper” examinations are not the best method of assessing educational achievement.
Discuss this view and give your own opinion.
Examinations are one of the most common methods of measuring learning in education systems throughout the world. At virtually every stage of the learning process, exams are used to verify that the learner is ready to move on to the next stage. However, many people believe that the role of examinations should be reconsidered.
There are clearly certain advantages to exams. They help to ensure fairness by imposing the same conditions on all exam candidates. They are also relatively versatile; different types of exam questions, for example, multiple-choice questions and essay tasks, can test different sorts of reasoning ability. However, exams also have clear drawbacks. Test-wise candidates can often perform well on exams without having good underlying knowledge or skills. On the other hand, some test-takers perform poorly in exams simply because of anxiety. Some teachers and learners focus only on those aspects of the curriculum that are likely to be tested, thus narrowing the educational experience for all.
A number of measures should be taken to address these concerns. Wherever possible, exams should match the content and activities of the learning environment. Exam tasks should be varied to give fair opportunities to candidates with different types of skills. Other types of assessment should also be considered; assignment writing, for example, to assess independent learning and research skills, or group projects, to measure teamwork ability.
Exams clearly have a role to play in ensuring proper, objective assessment of achievement. However, exams need to be carefully designed and supplemented with other forms of assessment if they are to be a truly useful component of the educational system.
[Collected Samples]
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, however, if, so, thus, well, for example, on the other hand
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 14.0 13.1623246493 106% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 8.0 7.85571142285 102% => OK
Conjunction : 7.0 10.4138276553 67% => OK
Relative clauses : 3.0 7.30460921844 41% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 8.0 24.0651302605 33% => OK
Preposition: 43.0 41.998997996 102% => OK
Nominalization: 8.0 8.3376753507 96% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1488.0 1615.20841683 92% => OK
No of words: 268.0 315.596192385 85% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.55223880597 5.12529762239 108% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.04607285448 4.20363070211 96% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.9517165981 2.80592935109 105% => OK
Unique words: 159.0 176.041082164 90% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.59328358209 0.561755894193 106% => OK
syllable_count: 468.9 506.74238477 93% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.60771543086 106% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 2.0 5.43587174349 37% => OK
Article: 1.0 2.52805611222 40% => OK
Subordination: 0.0 2.10420841683 0% => More adverbial clause wanted.
Conjunction: 1.0 0.809619238477 124% => OK
Preposition: 4.0 4.76152304609 84% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 16.0 16.0721442886 100% => OK
Sentence length: 16.0 20.2975951904 79% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively short.
Sentence length SD: 45.68941334 49.4020404114 92% => OK
Chars per sentence: 93.0 106.682146367 87% => OK
Words per sentence: 16.75 20.7667163134 81% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.0625 7.06120827912 58% => More transition words/phrases wanted.
Paragraphs: 4.0 4.38176352705 91% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.01903807615 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 11.0 8.67935871743 127% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 1.0 3.9879759519 25% => More negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 5.0 3.4128256513 147% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.081597926669 0.244688304435 33% => The similarity between the topic and the content is low.
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0292411030807 0.084324248473 35% => Sentence topic similarity is low.
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.045935480102 0.0667982634062 69% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0642650534562 0.151304729494 42% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0465527427078 0.056905535591 82% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 13.1 13.0946893788 100% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 46.78 50.2224549098 93% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.44779559118 118% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 10.7 11.3001002004 95% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.61 12.4159519038 118% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 9.56 8.58950901804 111% => OK
difficult_words: 87.0 78.4519038076 111% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 9.0 9.78957915832 92% => OK
gunning_fog: 8.4 10.1190380762 83% => OK
text_standard: 9.0 10.7795591182 83% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
Rates: 67.4157303371 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 6.0 Out of 9
---------------------
Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.