Traditional exams aren’t dead – they just need to be used correctly

We live in a changing world, and evaluation of students is far from exempt from this process of discovery and renewal. Exams are becoming less and less fashionable in higher education circles, but it’s important to stop and ask whether traditional assessment still has its place, even in the face of new, more holistic and/or “authentic” evaluation options becoming available.

In this article, we share some reflections on the advantages and strengths of different types of assessment, in the hope they will be helpful in your work as a teacher and in the role you play in your students’ learning through assessment.

When to use the traditional test

The traditional test is a standardised process for evaluating knowledge in a specific time frame, which usually involves students recalling information or memorisation – which undoubtedly can still be valuable to students. For example, if students are in a language class, learning new words and memorising their meaning makes it easier to expand their vocabulary and use it later in the appropriate context. Or if students are in physics classes, learning velocity formulas by heart will make it easier for them to understand later what it means for a car to travel at a certain number of kilometres per hour.

• Tactics to ensure students engage with and learn from feedback
• Assessment and feedback as an active dialogue between tutors and students
• How to negotiate the politics of mark agreement between tutors

In the above examples, traditional testing methods can help reinforce learning (in these cases, words and formulas) and strengthen its permanence in long-term memory. A multiple-choice, matching or true/false test could easily be used to evaluate such learning at a particular moment in the course, given that it represents fundamental elements of the subject.

Another possible use of the traditional test is to help motivate students to review and study information. An example of this is when there are assigned readings for a topic or module. A quick test (again, multiple choice, true or false and others are suitable here) on the content of these readings will encourage students to read the texts more carefully and, once the test is completed, realise whether they have grasped the main concepts or need to reinforce them.

Helpfully, learning platforms these days often have assessment tools that can generate traditional tests. In addition, many online tools can be used to create this type of assessment, such as Quizizz, Kahoot, Quizlet, Educaplay, Socrative and Google Forms, among others, with the bonus that many of them allow you to add a playful approach or style.

The limits of traditional testing

As we have seen, traditional testing is particularly useful for focusing on the skills of long-term memorisation of information, which corresponds to the first level of Bloom’s taxonomy.

However, this also reveals the limits of this type of evaluation, since it becomes very complicated, or indeed impossible, to evaluate high-order skills such as critical thinking, analysis, problem-solving and more with traditional testing – in addition to the relative difficulty of providing extensive feedback.

When looking for those higher-order skills, it usually makes sense to use “authentic” evaluations. As an alternative to the traditional test, authentic assessment helps students build their learning by contextualising and linking it to real life, both when studying and analysing a given situation or problem and solving it.

For example, in a first aid course, a teacher cannot use a traditional, written question-and-answer test to assess whether students know how to perform CPR. Practical skills, unsurprisingly, can very rarely be evaluated in this way. Equally, in an energy course, teachers should not use a traditional true or false test to assess whether students know how to perform an energy management assessment. In both cases, feedback focuses on practical learning, therefore traditional testing would be ineffective in assessing students’ knowledge and skills.

Traditional assessment remains a helpful resource

Based on the above, we can see that both traditional and authentic assessments remain useful and simply serve different purposes. A conventional test can be used when it is necessary to recall information such as data, events, places, ideas, definitions, formulas or theories. On the other hand, authentic assessment should be used when it is necessary to boost students’ learning by measuring their ability to apply such knowledge to solve problems in realistic contexts, rather than simply “know” the information.

Beatriz Murillo Pancardo, Pedro de Jesús García Reza and Mariano Garay Peña are all instructional designers in educational innovation and digital learning at Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico.

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