According to a professor, Rick Michell, examination is to help the markers classify students into different grades. It seems to be quite right, without the meaning of "unfair". But, in fact, when looking and thinking deeply on the issue, you may find out there're something wrong. Right, this saying is from markers' view solely, meaning that this system is not established for the students, but the markers.
Examination is used to test students' abilities, checking whether they can understand the learning material. If students get a pass, they will be promoted upper forms. For those who fail the exam, there're two ways left. One is staying at the form while another is being kicked out of the school. Apart from that, there's nothing important. How about high grades? It's just a game for children. High grade brings admiration and approval and that's it. To markers, high grade means nothing to them. What they are responsible for is classification. When taking the view of that, we may know how unfair examination actually is.
In AL examination, i've to take English Language paper. It's divided into 5 parts which are Listening(18%), Oral(18%), Practical Skill(28%), Writing(18%), and Reading(18%). To those who are unfamiliar with AL exam, Practical Skill may be an unknown. In essence, when doing this paper, students have to read about 10 pages-book and write a letter, fill in the blanks, and sometimes answer questions according to the book. In principle, you shouldn't copy and paste from the book. However, the fact is always incommensurate to the rules. Once you get the point, you get marks, no matter how you write. But, undoubtedly, if you cannot understand the purport of the articles, you may not get the right point. However, more importantly, it doesn't deserve 28% of the total mark even though this paper is checking your understanding on the articles. To students, it cannot check whether your understanding about English Language is up to standard. Comparing with other papers, Practical writing is surely not so important that it occupies 28% of the total mark, more than other papers for 10%. i stick to the belief that practical writing is no better to test your English Language ability than other papers. From a student's point of view, more marks should be given to writing. In writing, students' understanding on grammar, sentence structure, etc. will be thoroughly reflected. One may argue that grammatical correct can be easily achieved if writing simple sentence. However, i have to say AL exam doesn't set the demand that low! This rule can only be applied in CE exam. In AL exam, if you write like this, you just deserve a passing grade. Even worse, if you get more grammatical mistakes than usual, you may probably fail this paper.
However, marking writing is said to be too subjective. Markers find it hard to classify students into different levels. Without an objective marking scheme, markers cannot do what they are responsible for. Different markers may have different ideas when marking the same writing. Therefore, writing is no more important than "copy and paste" which markers can mark the papers with their marking scheme. Finally, students' ability cannot be truly reflected because the exam is made from the markers point of views, rather than from students'.
As a result, students' language abilities are criticized to be below standard. But i wanna ask, "WHO DID IT???" Lots of us work very hard, but unfair examination deters us from being success. You, old men, tell us off, and slash our abilities and our efforts, but have you ever taken other factors into consideration?
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