If you've been following me for a while you know that I hate the educational system of almost any country. It teaches you almost nothing, it does not prepare you for life and you're supposed to pay a lot of money to get a diploma that won't guarantee you any job.
It's actually so bad that in a lot of cases you finish school and you have to get out in the world and spend even more years on your own learning a bunch of things in order to actually get a decent job, things you didn't learn in school because you were too busy learning history or chemistry even tho you didn't care about those subjects.
But if there's something I hate more than the educational system itself, is the way they test you and the way they give you grades for how well you can memorize a bunch of useless information.
First of all, there's almost no job out there in the world that can't be done a lot better if you're working in a team. Teamwork should be something you learn in school, because it's vital to any job you have.
Working with someone else and trying to solve a problem will usually result in that problem being solved a lot faster and, in most situations, a lot better.
However, school does whatever it can to make sure you never take an exam with a class mate, and if you do (which rarely happens), it's only when the teacher tells you to. I believe this should be quite the opposite. Taking exams should be done together, with a classmate or with the entire class, and students should focus on their own test only in certain situations, when the teacher asks.
Second, tests show almost nothing. In some cases a test can actually show the level of knowledge someone has about a certain subject and it will matter. For example, I'm okay with the fact that people who want to become doctors should take a lot of tests. We should know if they are prepared for this profession or not. I'd like to know that my doctor has a diploma that assures me of his knowledge.
But that's an exception. In high school, tests have no reason to exist. Doing well in an exam shows two things - your ability to memorize a bunch of information that you probably won't need in the future, and your ability to tolerate the fact that you need to learn a bunch of bullshit and memorize it in order to "pass".
It's not right, and it's a crappy system. Tests should be something students take on their own to measure their own skill level and improve from that point. If you take two people and you test them based on their ability to do well in math class, the fact that one does poorly and the other one does better doesn't really show anything.
It shows that the first person is either not as good as math, or not as interested as the second person. All that is okay. Not everyone should be interested in math. People are unique and everyone has their own interests.
Tests show nothing, and if you're in school right now and you're depressed that you got a bad grade on a test, don't be. It shows nothing except that you weren't able to memorize a bunch of bullshit that you won't need in life. Focus on your own development and becoming a better person.