Is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict hisreading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. Theylower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedom. Teachers themselves areoften judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to train-ing their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are notalways the best educated; they are the trained in the technique of working under duress .
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment bysome anonymous examiners. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they makemistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks Of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. Theywork under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After ajudge's decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner's. There must surely be manysimpler and more effective ways of assessing a person's true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest thatexaminations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boilsdown to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recentlyscrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I am a teenage millionaire."