Our students' attitudes to exams

Long (2000:47) notes that 'assessment is...a major educational process, and without it, teaching would be a rather unfocused activity'. In fact, much of a teacher's work consists of planning, organising, evaluating in order to attain different educational goals.
For that reason, the teacher is in continuous need for feedback from his / her students; a feedback that helps have an idea about what goals have been achieved, what actions should be taken, and what teaching elements should be adjusted, altered or even deleted. In general terms, the students' exam papers reflect the teacher's work and represent the main part in his / her developement. The question worth asking now is to what extent can assessment be a reliable sourse of information for teachers?

Today, we can see that our students are more and more aware of the effect of testing in their schooling, but they have a particular view as to its significance in language progress. I have been teaching for only five years now (Teacher of English in a state school) and I noticed that students (Secondary School students/ 9th grade) give less and less importance to the lessons they take in class and turn much of their attention to exams. In other words, they focus more on their performance in exams and miss out the competencies that enable them to learn and acquire knowledge.
Apparently, an exam performance is subject to forgetfulness because as soon as the students get their marks of the last test, they approximately forget what they have learnt and start thinking about the next exam. ''Teacher, when will you give us the next exam?", my students ask.

Testing for our students does no longer cause them anxiety and apprehension. For the brilliants, it is a simple exercise that needs some attention, which is quite reassuring for us teachers, even that most of the time they constitute a very concise minority in our classes. For the slow , however, it is a rude act. So, for them, there is no need to make efforts and try to revise lessons; obviously, they think of cheating as a way out. For another category of students, cheating is rather the absolute solution and whatever the teacher may do to stop them, it is just a call for trouble. In our classes, mainly a group of repeaters with some undisciplined students make up this category. They, actually, believe that the exam-sheet is the only thing they can be evaluated for. Consequently, they never care about absenteism and misbehaviour .

If we consider the two last categories mentioned above, and who stand for the majority in our classes, we come to the conclusion that testing for them is more related to marks and results than to competence.This is certainly due to the influential impression 'the result' (the mark) has in our society. For instance, most parents never come to ask about their child's achievements in class; what interests them is the mark he / she gets in the exam paper. "The mark" may even be the subject for discussion among relatives and neighbours. when it is high, it is something to be proud of ; but when it is low, it is something to blame and punish for..
Among students, it symbolizes competition; "Teacher, who has got the best mark?"a student may ask. It may also be a symbol of intelligence, not in answering the questions but in cheating;"I never attended and I got 14", a repeater may claim to his friends. "The mark" also may suggest unity between friends;"Help me to do well in English and I will help you in French", a student may agree with his / her friend. If we examine the administrative staff in school, we will find that they never consider the student's absence or his / her behaviour in class, it is rather marks that are their sole concern. All in all, we can argue that the social aspect of testing results plays an important role in shaping students' attitudes to exams.

The way the teacher approaches exams in class explains why our students give too much importance to marks. As a matter of fact, teachers depend much on written exams to evaluate their students and proceed in their work and they ignore the student's abitities in class ( participation, behaviour, production, exercises, project work...). As a result, the students'concentration tends to be more on tests and the mark and the ways how to obtain it than on any other activity in class as it is not evaluated.
We can also notice that, In terms of written tests, the main abilities that teachers focus on are related to the curriculum. More specifically, there are three categories of educational targets or goals that students are called on to attain:
a) knowledge (factual information);
b) skills (how to do things); and
c) understanding (the ability to use information).
It is important to note that, even though there is general agreement about the need for such goals, research by Fleming and Chambers (1983) found that nearly 80 per cent of all questions in school tests dealt only with factual information. It seems that this penchant for factual information is due to 'the ease of using simple knowledge-based assessments, since tests which incorporate children's use of skills and understanding tend to be time-consuming to design and implement' (Long, 2000: 47).
In a sense, teachers tend to devise simple knowledge-based assessment and, unintentionally, discourage students from using their mind and intelligence to answer in exams, but rather incite them to cheat as they make with the factual information provided in their copybooks.

As a conclusion , I think that in order to make our students' attitudes towards exams more positive and to make the testing results a reliable feedback for the teacher, he / she should change the way he / she approaches exams and should tend to value his / her students' abilities in class