Exam season — that annual academic ritual of last-ditch, high-stress cramming — is upon the students of Canada. But as two major universities, York and Toronto, head into finals after prolonged teacher strikes, some students are fretting about a different sort of stress: The possible cancellation of this year’s big tests.

That would mean no risk of choking on exam day, but also no chance to bump up final grades. Either way, it would put any students spared final tests at the leading edge of a movement on campuses, at high schools, even elementary schools — the decline of the exam.

For all the energy and attention they demand, educators are pushing to marginalize exams. These are not just dying out as an irrelevance, like the slide rule. They are being killed off as an affront to human nature and dignity, like the strap.

“We are in the midst of an educational revolution,” says Stuart Shanker, distinguished research professor of philosophy and psychology at York University and a leading figure in educational reform. “Everything’s going to change now.”

Alberta is a leader in this, deciding this month to give less weight to standardized high-school exams and more to daily work. Ontario is following, with a pilot project for a new model of evaluation informed by the view high-stress exams give a false picture of a student’s abilities.

In the United States, Florida just eliminated a major Grade 11 exam on the grounds there are “too many tests;” Colorado, Washington, Arizona and others are making similar moves. New York’s mayor wants to relax admissions standards at specialist public high schools, mainly to take the weight off a major exam that favours students who can afford to hire tutors. And U.S. law schools are looking at ways to reduce increasing failures in bar admissions exams, in some cases letting students skip them entirely.

Driven by recent scientific insights into stress, cognition, memory and attention, the target of this revolution — the statue to be symbolically toppled — is not the pop quiz or the end-of-chapter recap test, but the high-stakes, all-or-nothing, pencil-chewing, hair-twisting, final exam.

Even China, the cultural wellspring of the tiger mother, is trying to lessen student workloads. And in India, which like other Asian countries still generally hews to the model of do-or-die exams and where parents were photographed last month scaling the wall of a school to slip cheat sheets to their children taking an exam inside, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently felt compelled to tell high-school students these exams “are not the end of your life.”

But there’s the rub: they seem that way.

“It is difficult to communicate the pain, suffering, and misery suffered by high-test-anxious subjects before, during, and after major evaluative experiences,” wrote Moshe Zeidner, an education professor at University of Haifa, Israel, in his 1998 book Test Anxiety.

It was part of a surge of interest in testing as enrolment rose and schools were revamped under progressive ideologies. But where teachers and parents might once have emphasized preparation to overcome exam anxiety, now the goal is to alleviate distress as much as possible by cutting exams or downplaying their importance.

Critics decry this apparent Montessorification of higher education. They argue ditching exams simply coddles immature students who would benefit from a bit of temporary pressure to prepare for the real world.

We’ve done a generation of kids a disservice by giving them so much self-esteem that they can’t deal with failure

“Sometimes I wonder who they are trying to make it easier on,” says Doretta Wilson, executive director of the Society for Quality Education, an advocacy group that opposes the “fads” of “progressivism” in teaching strategies.

She says the anti-exam ideology grew out of the “self-esteem” movement in education, in which failure is to be avoided at all costs, even when it is deserved.

“We are now reaping the consequences of that emphasis,” she says. “We’ve not trained our kids to deal with that kind of stress … We’ve done a generation of kids a disservice by giving them so much self-esteem that they can’t deal with failure.”

Once a place for elite competition among the best and brightest, university education now resembles inner-tube water polo, where the emphasis is on participation and everybody gets a medal, says Ken Coates, Canada research chair in regional innovation at the University of Saskatchewan and co-author of Campus Confidential, which criticizes declining university standards.

“Employers used to know that if you graduated university, then you had achieved certain things,” he says. Allowing students to skip exams is “taking away a key element of a university degree. People have forgotten at great detriment that the writing of a test is a valuable skill in its own right.”

There is evidence, however, the slow death of exams is not simply a sympathetic response to quivering students, but to new science around cognition, which suggests the traditional high-stress, all-or-nothing final exam under gymnasium floodlights may not be an accurate measure of learning.

“There is a time and a place for diagnostics, but a sole reliance on them does not seem wise to me,” says Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist who heads the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago and researches cognitive performance under pressure.

Stressful exams “rob us of our limited ability to pay attention to what we need to,” she says. It is comparable to why driving and talking on a cellphone is so bad; the worries associated with performance under pressure “soak up the resources that we could be using to focus on a test.”

This is not an entirely novel idea. “Test anxiety. The very words reverberate in people’s innermost beings,” wrote Wilbert J. McKeachie, a former president of the American Psychological Association, more than 20 years ago.

In the earliest recorded scientific investigation of the phenomenon, in 1914, one in five U.S. medical students was shown to have higher sugar content in their urine after a big exam. It suggested something unusual was happening in their bodies, although no one quite knew what it was.

The intervening decades have greatly clarified that physiological picture. Broadly, the idea is that exams are threatening situations, and some people respond with anxiety, manifested in heart palpitations, sweating, twitching, and dry mouth. To measure this objectively, researchers have taken spit samples before and after students write exams; their level of anxiety can be seen in the presence of cortisol in their saliva, a stress hormone and an indicator of arousal.

Darwinists will recognize this as the evolved adaptive response to danger. Freudians will recognize anxiety that verges on the neurotic, a response out of proportion to the threat. Less obvious is that the people who thrive under the pressure of exams and those who collapse under the stress are often showing the exact same physiological response. Just as “fight or flight” are flip sides of the same reaction, so, too, are succeed or choke. Increased heart rate, for example, can feel like panic, but it also means better oxygen supply to muscles and the brain.

Writing an exam is like doing homework professionally. Students who have learned in their bedrooms, or at the kitchen table, or under the devoted tutelage of a patient teacher, suddenly have to dress up, show up and perform under pressure. As such, it is a preview of adult life for people who are not yet adults. For some, the sensation is thrilling. For others, it can be traumatic.

“Ironically, those most likely to fail in demanding situations are those who, in the absence of pressure, have the greatest capacity for success,” concluded Prof. Beilock in a research paper, “Math Performance In Stressful Situations,” published in 2008 in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

This is why she advocates a technique of “reappraising arousal” in the context of examination, to think of stressful feelings as part of success, rather than failure. It is similar to Prof. Shanker’s idea of self-regulation, according to which students should still be tested, but must also learn to “effectively and efficiently cope with stress and then recover from that effort.”

“If the recovery is constrained, then the kid can’t think well, can’t write well,” he says. The proper response to this problem is not to tell students to suck it up, but to rethink how exams are given in the first place. Or whether to give them at all.

Psychologists have a quip about IQ tests — the only thing they measure is your ability to do IQ tests. They are not, as they purport to be, an objective measure of intelligence, like the air temperature of a room. Rather, they are variable, and vulnerable to luck and circumstance, like the score of a hockey game.

Exams are the same. They are cruel in their way, in their pose as objective measures of a student’s worth. As the American poet Hakim Bellamy recently put it in verse, under the title Test Anxiety, the test always has the right answer, but never says the right thing:

The test never whines,

but it never smiles either.

The test is already

what it wants to be

when it grows up.

National Post

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