A solution to exams: how we will get a 100% pass rate every year.

As the senior exams are now in full swing, I think it's appropriate that this week I write about fishing, or more specifically, the time I spent attempting to fish down at the Coast. Our story starts about a year ago when my family went down to a beach house on the South Coast for our holiday. Why they wanted to spend two weeks on a lump of sand with fluctuating weather conditions where everything (including bedding) rusts I don't know, but I tagged along in any case. We got to the little cottage (which had the structural stability of quicksand) and I decided to try some of the seaside activities that people so often talk about...

First off I tried surfing. I hadn't the foggiest where to start so I got myself a board and asked some of the locals what to do. "Wax the board." they all said. So with a slight bit of scepticism I did just that. I then ran into the ocean which, despite it being Africa and despite global warming was freezing, and attempted to catch the first wave I saw. Obviously, because I had waxed the board (which was a stupid idea really) it was very slippery, and thus as soon as I tried standing up it slipped out from under me and hit me in the head. Of course, having the perseverance of a bee flying into a window, I tried again, with the same result. And again. And again. It was when I began to bleed severely that I started thinking surfing wasn't for me. So, cold and broken, I receded from the water and gave up on the whole surfing venture. I then tried to build a sandcastle and, well let's just say that if you ever want a list of places that you don't really want sand...

I skulked back to the cottage where I found my brother and father setting up their fishing equipment. Personally I think it's a cruel and demeaning activity that you'll spend hours preparing for, just so you can spend more hours sitting on a cold, wet rock in the hope of luring some poor innocent creature into biting the very painful and sharp looking hook that you're dangling from a piece of string. Then, to add insult to injury, you'll probably say that the creature is too small and throw it back, where it will be eaten by a bigger fish. However, I'm sure fishing has a few good points, even though I can't exactly think of any right now... Nevertheless, I had nothing better to do so I got out a spare fishing stick and went with my bro and dad and sat on a rock to dangle a piece of string into the sea, just as it began to rain.

By the end of the day my dad had caught three biggish fish, my brother had caught a number of small ones and I had caught (no fisherman's tales here) a sum total of, well, zero. The thing is that their hours of preparation and toil had paid off, whereas for me who hadn't prepared at all, things didn't go too well. Now what you don't realise is that I've just led you through a 544 word analogy, because this moral also applies with exams: If you drift along and don't prepare, chances are you will see flaming wolves, but if you prepare and study and put in time and effort, although you cannot guarantee things will work out, in all probability you have ensured yourself a good mark.

But there's a problem with exams. If you study hard for, let's say two weeks in advance, and make sure you can recite the textbook off-by-heart, there is still no guarantee of a good mark. You could have a really bad day when you write it, or the teacher might ask things that you didn't go over in too much detail, or you might not understand the question, there's a whole bunch of things that influence how you write an exam. Studying just increases the chance of those things having less of an effect. And another thing is this: let's be honest here, once you've written an exam all the knowledge seems to leak out, which is then compounded by a holiday straight afterwards. I can hardly remember anything that I learned last year in Bio, for example. So, in essence, there is a whole list of things wrong with exams, and that's not to mention all the paper they waste, the work hours for the teachers, the cost of running the school for the duration, and all of the trivial things like that. This means that, in actual fact, exams are very useless and silly. This, of course, brings in a new problem. How then, are we going to test how much people know and have learned?

Fear not, because I have a solution! After much thought and consideration, I have come up with a plan that will replace exams forever: at the end of each year, the school should put students from each subject into real world situations. For example, you could ship off all the science students to NASA, where they would have to design their own rocket engines using their school based knowledge on the theory of expanding gasses. They should then take a ride in their rocket and if it works, pass with distinction. If it doesn't work, well then the rocket would crash and burn and you wouldn't have to worry about that student any more. This way the pressures are on for students to properly learn their stuff, and theoretically you should get a 100% pass rate every year.

It's a brilliant idea really. Think about it, all the Biology students could perform their own kidney transplant, all the Business Studies students could open their own shops, all the Accounting students could do the bookkeeping for JSE for a week, all the French students could be dropped off in France for a while to see how well they get on, all the Geography students could be made to do Journey without maps and all the IT students’ laptops could get thrown out of the window so that they would have to fix them on their own. This system will revolutionize education everywhere, now all I need to do is get backing from the IEB.

But what about English, you ask? Well, all the marks are drawn out of a hat anyway, so...

James Hosken