IELTS task 2 - Many people believe that formal “pen and paper” examinations are not the best method of assessing educational achievement. What is your view of examinations?

Question

Many people argue that formal pen and paper examinations are not the best way of evaluating educational achievement. Personality, I completely agree with this view.

A formal exam is an assessment form that includes knowledge of the whole learning and researching process. Besides, they can be organized in mass implementation with a large number of students. But formal examinations have still revealed limitations in the evaluation process

There are two main reasons to prove my opinion.

The first reason is that pen and paper exams in many cases do not judge the result accurately. Because that kind of exam is predictable, so the students can prepare it by rote learning at home just someday or maybe a day before the test.  They also have academic dishonesty such as it is not difficult to catch a student cheating in the exam. Moreover, many people perform poorly in exams because they are anxious or stressed, not because they didn’t gain anything from studying.

Furthermore, there are many ways to evaluate educational achievement besides pen and paper exams like the oral exams, doing a project related to knowledge learned, or even through the teacher's comments about students’ entire learning process… the teachers can also combine some methods to evaluate accurately, although it is a bit difficult to organize in large scale and it can take a lot of time and effort of both students and teachers.

In conclusion, for the reasons I mentioned above, I believe that teachers shouldn’t have mechanical thinking in use formal pen and paper examinations to evaluate the whole educational achievement.