On The Value of Tests

Writing this at 4:40am after a day of 3 AP exams. Slept too early.

I’ve been thinking about whether exams make someone a better person. They are stressful. They can corrupt a love for learning.

But they also teach dealing with a stress in a relatively low-pressure, stable environment. The task at hand is extremely well defined, sometimes you are even given a guide to prepare, and nothing (no monetary outcomes) are at risk if you fail. However, for a job - high-stakes situations arise without warnings, unstructured, and can be mired in political capital problems. Thus, are exams the training wheels for adolescents to deal with these times later?

Furthermore, in these exams those who either studied the most, were the smartest, or cheated typically do best. It may feel discouraging to see those who barely studied get an A compared when you worked much harder. Again, not a good reason to <3 exams. But isn’t this also realistic of how performance goes in the career “real-world”?

So to go back to this (argumentative essay) prompt - no, exams don’t make you a better person. Or I could argue that (for me at least), taking hard exams (and doing well on them) does make me more confident to take on harder, stressful challenges. But an N=1 sample is too small to generalize, so I’m going to stick for no today.

The bottom line is that exams are preparation of something more in a heavily controlled environment. And I think it’s going to be a long-time until we can evaluate a person’s skills in a situation that doesn’t involve an exam (e.g. reading their brain flows and chemicals) as accurately. So might as well try to frame tests as something nice for the interim time.