How well will you take the test today?

I've never liked exams.
That's not to say I am rubbish at them, my exam results are all pretty good, but wait! I've fallen into a trap right there!

Already I am defending my scores in these tests as if to try and justify myself. Jeez!

Let me put this a different way.

Exams are useless. At least in my opinion, since for example I have an A-Level in German.

Can I speak German? Barely.

But as you get older of course employers will appreciate this and not expect you to be able to reel off pages of German phrases at their pleasure, so what do exam results mean at this point in my life?

Now, my understanding of the point here is to show your mental abilities, insofar as learning and regurgitating information, you know, like learning a new process and putting it into action at work. Thing is - exams are totally useless for this.

An exam shows just one thing, as far as I am concerned - how well you do exams. I know many folks will be up in arms about this belief, but bear with me - an exam is a couple of hours out of your life and takes place in a high pressure environment devoid of your learning materials, notes etc (I know some exams don;t have such restriction, but I have never taken one) and in this respect it is the exact OPPOSITE of the work environment, and becomes almost entirely a memory exercise.

There are a billion things that can mess you up on a single day, eg a bereavement, illness, dreaded mental blocks, dustractions, lack-of-sleep-cos-you-were-worrying-about-exams etc etc.

What do good exam results prove? How well you revise for, and do, exams. If this is what a company wants from its employees (er.. can't think of a company that would right now) then fine, but I can't see that exam results by themselves help tell anyone about anything, other than how good they were at the exams.

It's a lot like IQ tests, which are meaningless measures in and of themselves, since all scores are measured against only those other people who did this test, and even then there are too many other variables to consider to say you have "an IQ of 135". For these to be useful everyone who did one would instead have to do many many of them - about 1000 maybe, and EVERYONE IN THE WORLD would have to do them at the same moment- then it would be meaningful.

I prefer the idea of 100% coursework based scoring, but this is about as likely to happen as my lovely wife turn out to be an Axe Murderer.

The misunderstanding of what IQ tests really mean reminds me of a blog I saw today on BBC - about the press' use of dodgy surveys to make their point. This has been going on for years and is really really annoying - this is the way that stupid made up crap gets credence.

If you see a particularly awful one, let me know. They're hilarious!

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