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Examinations Should Be Abolished

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Examinations Should Be Abolished
I think school exams are adequate to measure student progress. I don't like high-stakes testing because the participants are minors and the quicker you can get these students in a community college environment, the quicker they are able to mature and know why it's important to work hard. I also don't like them because they aren't content exams, but instead are literacy tests, thus while most people are going to perform in accordance with the literacy test as to their abilities, the correlation is far from perfect as these are simply "averages" and thus aren't completely but are "highly" reliable. There just isn't that understanding; the standardized test measures their progress, but it doesn't encourage the student to strive for anything, thus I don't see how some students are as motivated as they could if the learning environment was more creative.

For instance, it is my belief that a 20 year old who is a senior in H.S. is probably going to still act like a 16 year old; having held him back isn't going to change him or her if the environment hasn't changed. If that student is instead around adults, it is more likely that he will adapt to that way of acting. I think 3/4 or 75% of the way a person acts is based on their environment rather than solely on development.

Even as an older person, I don't like pre-exams (such as LSAT, GMAT, GRE, or MCAT) because it attempts to predict how you will do in the first year of study. I especially don't like it because even if you took courses as an undeclared student (and paid all the necessary costs), the admission department still has access to the testing records, while in the undergraduate level, all you got to do is skip down to the community college, take courses, do well, and you may get to go to the college of your choice or at least the state university. Even if the admissions department at the particular school doesn't use scores from standardized tests for those who complete a year of graduate study (and forfeit

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