Exams. Most students’ and even former students’ stomachs flip just hearing the word. No matter what level one is at, the notion of writing an exam is incredibly daunting and elicits copious amounts of anxiety.
U of T is an extremely prestigious school, one that is looked upon with respect from all over the world, and thus it can be assumed that the majority of U of T students are hard-working, successful scholars. When exam time comes, the students are ready and have undoubtedly invested endless amounts of effort and care into their preparation. Papers are flying, fingers are crossed, and nerves are at their highest.
So imagine you walk into an exam. The exam you’ve been dreading and praying about for weeks. The exam that has taken your life away for too long. The one course that makes you feel incompetent and worthless as a student. Just when you feel like you couldn’t be any more anxious about this godforsaken exam, the situation goes from bad to worse.
The professor goes before the class and completely destroys any glimpse of hope you’d had of doing well. He tells the class that the exam is virtually impossible to do well on and so not to be caught off guard with the difficult questions. What?! So not only are we scared by the challenge that any exam offers, but now on top of that we are told that no matter how prepared we think we are or how hard we’ve worked we will definitely not be able to succeed.
I happen to be speaking about a recent experience I had at U of T, though I am sure this kind of thing happens more often that we would like to think. It is just as mortifying as it sounds. When the exam (that I’m sure I failed) was through, I began to wonder why and how a professor could write an exam that was so difficult he had to practically attach a disclaimer to it. “BEWARE: no matter what you do you will not do well on this exam!”
If a professor knows that the exam is this hard, why not just modify the exam so that those who deserve to do well will in fact succeed?
By all means, make the exams challenging so as to sort through which students have done the work and which ones have not. But to make an exam so difficult that the professor has to explain how impossible it is before handing it out seems incredibly foolish and completely cruel. Doesn’t this go beyond the intentions of an educational establishment? Isn’t the purpose of a university to teach and evaluate the knowledge learned?
If so, this type of experience doesn’t follow these elements. The profs that make exams so impossible are not testing our ability to apply the concepts learned in their classes, they are asserting their power by giving us an exam that is too difficult for even the most prepared of students.
An exam situation such as this is the perfect time for the psychological phenomenon of “learned helplessness” to take over. As will be familiar if you’ve read a psych text, learned helplessness is “the hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over bad events.” You’re told there’s nothing you can do to succeed on the exam and, well, you believe it. When the difficult questions come along, you’re more inclined to leave them blank. It is situations like this, that sadly happen all too often at U of T, that cause students to lower their own academic standards.
Students are conditioned to learn that it is impossible to succeed at most-if not all-exams at the university. This is the very phenomenon that causes students to lose faith in the education system, and to begin to see post-secondary education as a form of brutal psychological, mental, and social punishment. In my opinion this negative perception is a devastating problem that exists at U of T. Instead of being about the love of learning and the acquisition of life-altering knowledge, education has become about rigorous memorization, indisputably rough schedules, and standards that cannot be met by even the most responsible of students.
As I walk through the halls and streets of the U of T campus I am saddened by the forlorn and desperate faces painted on the students. Since when did university become a punishment? Most people are here to celebrate the benefits of bright futures and knowledge-filled nations, not to feel helpless after years of working harder than should ever be expected. We should be able to find a way to challenge able-bodied minds and not punish those with shining futures.
