The Exam

Today we had an exam at school. It was the stupidest exam I think I've ever taken in my life. I don't see how it's supposed to judge how smart you are. It's actually worse than a standardized test.

The first thing that happened was they gave us a little sheet of paper with a bunch of math problems on it (Though it was fairly basic math) and told that we had one minute to complete the problems. After wasting 45 seconds figuring out that : meant divide I successfully completed one problem. (I also wasted time trying to figure out what they wanted us to do)

The other kids all seemed to do it fairly quickly though.

The next task was that we were given a sheet of paper with a text on it and had one minute to write as much of the text by hand on our answer sheet as we could. I wrote one sentence.

Then we had the rest of the hour and a half time period to answer questions.

It took me forever because I had to look up words. One of the parts was like "look up in the 9th grade physics book the following things" and I was like "Whoo hoo! I'll be able to do that!" So I get one of the four (There are like six or seventh 11th graders and they have four physics books) books and I go to look up the words they want the definitions of. There's no glossery in the back. Okay, fine, I can deal with this. So I hunt for the index. Nope. Not one of those either. What kind of textbook has a table of contents, and no index or glossery?

there was also a part where you were given a paper with a text and had one minute to read as much of the text as you could outloud.

I tried to do my best on the test. I put effort into it and all. NOt that it matters because I don't get grades anyway.

I'm just having trouble seeing how an exam like that shows your true potential, and really shows how smart you are. All it does is show that you're a fast writer, or reader, or mathmetician. HOnestly even the part of the test that took longer wasn't a good evaluation of knowledge because it was heavy on the science questions.

It was an interesting experience, to take said exam, but I don't think it was a very good exam. I think there are better ways of testing knowledge.