Overburdened students

Tests, tests, exams, and more tests

Whenever I visit a friend’s house, who has four school-going children, I always find, apart from the summer holidays period, inevitably, that all of his children have either just finished giving tests or examinations, are preparing for them, or are in the middle of them. And given there are four children, one of them is always in the middle of tests, and so the household is always ensuring that at least that child, and in general all the children, are always preparing for these tests and keep up with their studies.

I asked the children how many tests/examinations they got. They reported that they had term finals and midterms, and in addition monthly assessments as well as weekly ones. And then sometimes they would get surprise tests as well. So with 6-8 subjects to contend with for every student, it means every week they had some exam or test to worry about. And a lot of teachers took tests at the start of the week giving students the weekend for preparation. Which means the weekends are usually spent studying for more than one test coming up. I checked with some other children in other ‘good’ private schools too, and the pattern was similar.

The story of homework assignments is in addition to the test/examination issue. But it does add to the time children have to spend studying every evening. Again with 6-8 subjects, and no coordination between teachers on homework assignments, students get homework for every subject almost every day.

Parents and schools want good results from students, and clearly quality of education is linked to effort as well, but what is an appropriate level of effort that we want our students to make? Should they be spending all or almost all of their time away from school studying, and should this continue all the time? One can understand more work in key years and at key times, like closer to finals and so on, but such an effort cannot and should not be expected all the time. This will not lead to better quality.

Children, like adults, need time to internalise what they read. They need to play, mentally and physically, with what they learn so that they can make it a part of their conceptual framework. If children are always cramming for exams and working on their homework, when do they get time to reflect on and play with what they are learning and internalise the material? And if they do not do this, they will develop a tendency to cram and will make rather poor students, and more importantly, will end up going through the education system and even getting all the certificates and degrees, but without having the ability to use what they have learnt.

I was surprised to find that many students use ‘study guides’ even at O-Level or A-Level stages. How can this be good? The students feel they have to cram as quickly as possible, but if they are not taking the time to read their textbooks and original sources that have been put in their syllabi, they are shortchanging their learning process.

I have seen this in many students already. If you ask them to define or explain something they will rattle off the definitions and explanations immediately. But, at least in the case of economics, I can tell which books have they usually studied from because they use the same words that are in their books. If you ask them to explain, in their own words, what they have said, many of them are stumped and confused. Furthermore, if you ask them to give an example, from their life or from around them, to illustrate the principle they are talking of, many of them cannot do that. This is tragic. If children are not able to connect what they are learning with their lives while in schools, what are we teaching them and how are we teaching them?

Are private schools, and almost all of the top private ones seem to be quite similar in their approach to education, pushing students too much to cram and reproduce rather than study, understand, and reflect on what they have studied? And are they also over-testing the students and giving them too much homework? The world is competitive and we have to prepare our youth well, but we should not take things to the point where the preparation we give them kills their creativity and hampers their development and competitiveness. This would be counterproductive at so many levels.

A connected issue, but one that I have been asked to raise by a number of parents, is about the physical load we put our children under. One of my friends tells me that his child, in grade one, weighs less than how much his school bag weighs. The school bag has six text books and six notebooks apart from stationary, lunch box and so on. The child drags this bag to school everyday and drags it back in the afternoon. In higher grades the bags might not outweigh the children but they do remain very heavy. This is another indicator of the load on children, quite literally. Why can’t schools, who can afford it, have lockers for children, or desks that have a drawer in them where children can leave some of the books/notebooks they do not need to bring home on any particular day? But if they have class periods for each subject everyday and get homework for all subjects too, and have tests happening too frequently as well, it will not be possible to leave the books home or at school overnight. The connection with workload is clear.

Educational quality should be a concern for everyone: the parents, the school, and the society. There is an ‘optimal’ way of doing things and we should know that time spent on a task and developing understanding of the task is not linearly related: quality of education does not keep improving as we put more and more pressure on children. At some point additional effort can lead to reduced understanding. In some schools, as a pedagogic tool, it seems there is just too much pressure on students. The parents, feeling that this is good, are going along with it. But it is counterproductive. It is forcing children to take sub-optimal routes such as cramming and/or resorting to study guides and so on. Parents and school administrations need to look into the issue in more detail.

The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]