testing, testing, testing….

Don’t know why I’m blogging instead of revising – probably because I accept the futility of cramming 20 weeks of study into the next 2 hours – and Facebook has gotten boring. I’m so not ready. It’ll take more than a wing and a prayer – I’ll be needing a 737 and a full house at Lincoln cathedral to get me through this one. Exams are so false. It’s not an assessment of my ability to understand the concepts of poststructuralism; the rethinking of the essential and the innate into the fluid and uncontainable, how knowledge is power and discursive practices replicate culturally specific control mechanisms not only through state and institution but how as individuals we reproduce our own repression through processes of monitoring, surveillance and self-regulation. No, it’s purely a memory test – and my memory is currently engaged – with other things.  We need to address assessment. Reducing learning to recall by rote is not what higher education should be about. I’m being judged on my ability to memorise enough content to write (pen and paper???) for three hours in an exam room that’s horrifyingly like being back at school and I’m not happy 🙁