Exams —It’s time for Artificial Intelligence(AI) to take over

A usual Monday morning, with my eyes hardly open, i started looking for some dopamine in WhatsApp. So many messages, that’s unusual in these groups, i mused. Most of them were congrats messages over some exam results.

Parents and kids are so obsessed about exams and marks that they forget why schools exist.

Let’s go back to where it all started. Why do we have schools to start with?

We have schools because human race have advanced a lot and we want all humans to learn what we have already created and get them ready for keeping the human race going and of course advancing the human race.

Exams and marks are some very outdated methods of measuring kids knowledge. Exams were created because people wanted some standard way of measuring people’s memory when the world didn’t have google or wikipedia or any of the kind of intelligent devices like phones which we have now.

Marks doesn’t reflect knowledge. Exams evaluates very short term memory which are easily forgotten and expect some very standard definitions from some text. Standard definitions matter because human teachers are evaluating these papers and it is easier for them to compare standard text answers. They don’t have time to read creative answers and thus ignores the good answers.

The way probably we should do exams in future is to keep it open book and let kids come up with creative answers. Let the kids apply the knowledge and solve problems. Let these papers be evaluated by AI not by bored humans who are highly unpredictable and it is never fair when kids are judged by different human teachers.

I saw some of the parents crying because their kid got 77% and wish they got at least 80%. They were saying that nothing can be done now, what happened has happened. It was as if the world has come to an end for the kid. I explained to them taking a long time on how exams doesn’t matter at all.

They finally seemed to get it and i went to my room with a self satisfaction that I was able to convince someone.

After sometime, i heard them talk the same old story to my better half. I smiled.

It is not that easy to retrain the brains of people who consider marks as the real reflection of knowledge. May be some day there will be nothing called exams or marks or schools, hope it is not too late by then.