Exams Around the World
28th November 2015
Test-taking is a dreaded experience that the country’s kids and young adults share with their counterparts across the globe. The ritual at its core doesn’t vary much: Students sit at a table or a computer desk (or sometimes, as shown below, on the floor), pencil and/or mouse in hand, the clock ticking away mercilessly. America for its part is home to what The Atlantic has described as an “alphabet soup” of standardized tests, including: the NAEP, SBAC, PARCC, ACT, and, of course, SAT. Testing has become increasingly notorious in the U.S., to the point that tens of thousands of parents across the country have opted their kids out of standardized tests.
I’ve never understood the angst in Certain Circles about testing. My first impulse is to assume that those who worry about tests are those who know they are likely not to pass (or whose kids are likely not to pass), and extend that into a presumption that the test-haters are achievement-haters who want everybody to get a trophy just for showing up, again as a sublimation of their own feelings (or knowings) of inferiority. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.
In America, perhaps all the testing helps explain why “all-nighters” and Adderall abuse are the norm on many college campuses. But there is an unhealthy obsession with acing the test abroad, too. Fraudulent college applications are reportedly rampant among students in China—the birthplace of the standardized test—aspiring to attend school in the U.S. And hundreds of people in India were recently arrested in connection with a massive cheating scandal. (Many of those arrested were believed to be family members of the 10th-grade test-takers.) Meanwhile, as NPR has reported, “the relentless focus on education and exams is often to blame” for suicide among teens in South Korea, the leading cause of death for that demographic.
Another, perhaps complimentary, explanatory character flaw is an apparent desire to make sure that Da Poor Iddle Kiddies never have to face the bleak prospect of stress in their lives, as exemplified by the current Crybully Crisis on college campuses. (This is what helicopter parenting leads to: A generation of weaklings who take refuge in their fascist impulses.) My attitude toward somebody who would commit suicide because of a test is something on the order of think of it as evolution in action; if you can’t face a test, you’re not going to survive Real Life, so better quit now before you’ve wasted everybody’s time. But that’s me, and I’m a notorious hard-heart. Ask anybody.
I’ve always regarded a test as a puzzle to be solved, rather than a hurdle to get over. Like looking in a mirror, it gives you a better idea of who you are and where you fit. And that’s good to know.