Created by Karena on Feb. 7, 2024
School has only been back in session for a few weeks, but the students of grades nine, ten, and eleven have already undergone an academic tradition that most students will think of with much trepidation and anger: exams. With the tenth and twelfth graders getting ready to take their IGCSE and IB exams, respectively, in the spring, they will be taking the preparatory step that is mock exams. Thus, students will be spending a week immersed in the chaotic world of cramming for and writing exam papers.
To students thinking back on the exam period, the tradition of standardized testing may feel like some sort of modern device that has been invented purely to make them miserable. The truth, however, is much more long-standing than that, and is rooted in much purer motives. In the eleventh century, when China was under the rule of the Song dynasty, the idea of standardized testing was expanded greatly from its previous forms (which had existed since approx. 605 CE). For members of the Chinese government, the reasoning behind this change in academic systems was a need for equality.
Hereditary nobility, or the idea that land and titles should be passed down through families, probably existed since the times of the Roman Empire. For the children of nobility, this power was not guaranteed to stay theirs. Inheritance throughout most of the world, and in Song China, worked in similar ways, where the eldest son would inherit his father’s rights. The only way to gain any power in these systems was to marry, an option that was not available to the lower classes in most cases. At its core, hereditary nobility was a deeply unjust system. Its idea of keeping power within one family meant that, for the vast majority of people, climbing the social hierarchy was all but impossible, and so too was gaining an access to education.
With these thoughts in mind, the Song dynasty sought to make societal positions based upon an individual's skills, rather than on their birth. Their efforts focused in particular upon the selection of scholar-officials, a social class within the empire that was deeply involved in the workings of the government. The historical evidence suggests that these efforts worked, or at least partially. As a positive result, the number of people who held degrees increased by four or five times from the previous dynasty. Yet it must be acknowledged that, at the same time, there are also many flaws in the system.
Firstly, the people who earned these degrees in Song-era China were always men, and very often those who came from the upper classes, meaning that farmers and other laborers did not profit as much from these changes as the government had hoped they would. In addition to this, modern research has pointed out that there are numerous flaws in the standardized testing systems. These defects can be the failure of tests to analyze students’ critical and creative thinking skills, the historical use of these tests to “prove” that other groups were inferior, or the way test-based learning systems increase student stress and can lead to worsened academic and social performance overall.
In the past decades researchers, educators, and numerous others have been taking a closer and closer look at the testing systems that define students’ lives. They have compounded a plethora of information that these exams and other tests can have a negative effect on students, but the key ideas behind the equality of these systems still remain. Thousands of people involved in the world of academics have used this information to shape and reshape the ways in which students and millions of others are tested, and although the journey has been long, there is no doubt that it will continue for a long time to come. So as the students of ISR look forward to more exams in the months to come, they can consider the knowledge that while the challenges might seem needlessly demanding, they are a result of more than a thousand years of people striving for the best for others.
Sources:
Elshaikh, Eman M. “READ: Women in Song China (article).” Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-4-regional/43-a-dark-age-betaa/a/read-women-in-song-china-beta. Accessed 10 January 2024.
“Exam.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exam. Accessed 10 January 2024.
“Hereditary title.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_title. Accessed 10 January 2024.
Nguyen, Nathan. “The Flaws of Standardized Testing.” ETWA: Educating the World Association, 11 February 2023, https://www.etwaofficial.org/post/the-flaws-of-standardized-testing. Accessed 10 January 2024.
“Scholar-official.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar-official. Accessed 10 January 2024.