Personally I think exams are a waste of time. Maybe this is the sick me talking a week before my giant aptitude test but exams, in my opinion, is a horrible evaluation of a person’s ability to succeed in life. Yes, with great exam marks, you are more prone to get into better graduate schools, etc. But does that mean the others who don’t do well on exams cannot perform well in real life situations?Exams only assess your ability to read information and memorize it to some extent, assess your test-taking abilities, and rank students unfairly because the person making the exams is not always the same. A plethora of my friends in university have told me that essentially what they do for exams is to memorize all they need to know for that exam, then forget it all before the next exam comes along. If getting good grades is partially because of doing this, then what’s the point?

I may be biased due to my lack of test-taking abilities, and somehow I always mess up or blank out during an exam and completely forget what I’ve studied the week beforehand. But that’s just me, and I’m pretty sure there are plenty of others just like me. Indubitably, there are the ones who are extremely talented at taking exams and surprisingly do well even with the questions that they’ve guessed. Oh, how I envy them.

But nonetheless, there are the ones who are naturally gifted with the ability to learn a mass amount of material within a short amount of time, time manage well, and do excellent on exams also, but those are scarce. Average students like me on the other hand, do no possess these so-called time-management qualities and tend to do things very last minute, even when I know the ending will not be pleasant. Just because someone is good at taking exams does not necessarily mean they are good at the practical parts of life. I wish schools would put more emphasis on practical work and actually access a person’s ability to perform tasks well instead of having these stress-invoking mechanisms that can either make you or break you.

In the end, I only have myself to blame and this is my little spiel on exams. I’m just so sick of always having to study so much ahead of time and still blank out on exams. I don’t know whether I just get so anxious or nervous when taking exams. Just not my forte, I guess.