From past to now, formal “pen and paper” examinations have always been considered as an irreversible method to assess student’s educational achievement. However, many, including I, believe that they are not the best ways and there are a double-sided problem in these kinds of methods.
For openers, formal “pen and paper” exam is a good way to measure student’s knowledge. Exams include several types of task so as to measure different abilities. Therefore, peple who do well in exams often have wide and stable knowledge. Nevertheless, the other side of the problem in this method is that pen and paper exams are often predictable, so students can prepare by rote learning. They just learn by heart and write down what they remember. The result is that they can get even high marks while actually understanding nothing. In addition, students can treat in exams by cribbing other students. So the understanding they have do not deserve their result.
Beside pen and paper exams, there are two another ways to measure student’s understanding in certain subject which are listening and speaking test and practicing test. For example, it is impossible to conclude whether a student is good at English or not when just basing on their exam papers because maybe they get good mark at writing, they cannot speaking fluently and listening well. So speaking and listening test helps to evaluate their speaking and listening capability. For some subjects like biology, chemistry, computing, for example, practicing test is necessary to assess how deeply they comprehend about the subject and how they put what they learned at class in pratice. If they just have knowledge in theory, it is not enough.
In brief, pen and paper examinations can be a good way to assess student’s educational achievement, but it is not the best way. It will be more effective to combine it with other methods of assessing like listening and speaking test and practicing test.