There have been a lot of arguments about whether exams encourage students to learn. In my opinion, exams do not encourage students to learn.
First of all, students study very hard for the exam so they do not have enough sleep. If students do not have enough sleep, they may feel sleepy and tired on the next day. Thus, students cannot pay all their attention in the lessons and acquire new knowledge. For example, Candice studied very hard for the first term exam from 4:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. every day. She slept for 3.5 hours only and then went to school. She could not concentrate in lessons and would fall asleep. From this example, we can see that exams do not encourage students to learn and students are unable to concentrate in lessons.
Secondly, exams give students lots of pressure. Nowadays, parents give birth to one baby only. Parents put all their hope on one child. Besides, people generally believe that getting high marks is equal to getting a high salary job. Students do not want their parents to be disappointed so they study extremely hard. This gives themselves lots of pressure and they will soon lose the interest of discovering and acquiring new knowledge because they just want to get a good result. As a result, exams do not encourage students to learn.
Thirdly, exams only encourage rote learning instead of deep learning. Students start studying for the test the week before the uniform test until the moment right before the test starts. Students use their short-term memory to memorize all things they have learnt in a term. For example, Jasmine got a good result in the exam. However, Jasmine forgot everything after the exam. She gained nothing but good results on the report card. Thus, students actually have not acquired the knowledge by heart after the exam.
What is more, getting bad results in the exams will actually lower students’ self-esteem although some people think that exams encourage students to learn. For example, Katy got a poor result in Chinese but her friends got high marks. Katy was upset and was not confident to talk to her friends because she was afraid of being laughed at by other classmates. If Katy cannot communicate with her classmates, peer learning will become meaningless and useless. As a result, Katy cannot build up her confidence and passion for learning because of the bad results in exams.
In conclusion, exams give students lots of pressure, affect their sleeping time, encourage rote learning and lower students’ self-esteem. Thus, exams do not encourage students to learn.