Exams are stressful, and there is no doubt in it. Recently, students got more anxious about their final grades than ever. Whether an exam or final test, most children take them seriously. Final grades have much more power to influence the student’s future than any classroom test, and both teachers and students consider it to be wrong.
Having exams at the end of the year is very conventional for educators, but the approach is already outdated. Students do not discover new information at the exam, instead, all their weak points come to the surface. A few hard-working students with the excellent memory perform at the high level in the exams or tests. The rest of kids take exams as a game in which one loses all just because they get unlucky. Therefore, it makes sense to dismiss exams as a form of gambling in education.
Standardized tests are not good for children either. All students are different, but most of them are scared of the final assessment, be it a test or exam. Some of them have test anxiety as they forget everything staring at multiple sheets before them. The others are more scared of exams because there are teachers to ask additional questions or fail the students they do not like. Either way, a separate procedure of final assessment does no good to students and teachers.
In some schools, exams are already replaced by final projects. Students take a couple of months to find an interesting topic and make their coursework interesting and exciting to themselves. By the end of the year, they are ready to show what they have learned by means of this project. Most students have chances for success showing their projects instead of completing the examination.