The Current - Without final exams, are students really learning?

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Across Canada, final exams are disappearing from high schools. Since the pandemic, some school boards have dropped or reworked them entirely. Supporters say the shift reduces student stress and allows for more meaningful assessments. But critics worry we’re sending teens into adulthood without learning how to cope with pressure. We speak with two educators on opposite sides of the debate: What are we really testing for — and what happens when those tests disappear?

Ten years ago, I asked my partner Kelsey if she would marry me. I did that, despite the fact that every living member of my family who had ever been married had also gotten divorced. Forever is a Long Time is a five-part series in which I talk to those relatives about why they got divorced and why they got married. You can listen to it now on CBC's Personally. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. It's almost summer. It's practically here. But if you're in high school, there may still be a key set of hurdles to get through exams. For these grade 11 and 12 students in Vancouver,

the pressure is on. I'm taking an exam for physics today. I'm nervous. I feel like it's hard to feel genuinely prepared for any exam for me, because you're never sure what'll pop up on the test. I mean, I put a lot of emphasis on my grades, so I'm nervous for every exam I get. So, yeah, it's very nerve-racking.

I have a math exam and an English exam. My math exam is kind of hard, but I think if you just study a lot, you'll do well on it. And then my English exam worries me because I'm just really not that good at English. Counting this year, I've done six. Some students love exams. It's a chance to up their final grades or perhaps prove to themselves how much they've learned. Others, not so much, they question the usefulness of exams.

I just see it more so as sometimes you're not learning, you're just memorizing. I feel like they're not like a great way to show you're learning. It's mostly memorization. Uh, normally the way I study for exams is just like a great way to show you're learning. It's mostly memorization Normally the way I study for exams is just like a week or a week and a half before I just cram as much information In my head and I really doesn't I really don't feel like that like shows that I actually understand it It's just memorization. I'll probably forget it within like a month or so and I'll just have to relearn it next year That's normally what happens for me So I think final exams are geared towards people

who are really good at taking tests, which I'm not very good at taking tests, so it's really hard for me to sit down and write and focus, versus if there was something like a final project, I'd be able to do very well, because I like to work in groups, work in projects and things like that. In Alberta, Kelly Ellingson's daughter

is finishing grade 11, and Kelly worries about the stress that exams put kids under. What these exams are just doing is setting the students up for failure in my opinion. It is stressful, but it's what's expected of these kids right now. There's nothing that she really can do any different. You need great grades. So unfortunately, these kids have to buckle down and really perform well and if that means going to bed at midnight because they are wanting to get their homework done and completed and get the grades that is what is expected of these kids on a day-to-day basis. There's some days if you see

your kid come home and they are just at the max because they just wrote two exams in the day and then they're now having to come home and study for another day. There's days where I as a mom, I'm like you're done. I want you to go decompress, I want you to go for a run, I want you to go outside and go get some beautiful fresh air and then maybe read a book or do something that you're wanting to do versus some of that schoolwork. It's imperative to keep these kids healthy and top-notch and that means in their mental health. Final exams aren't necessarily back on every high schooler's schedule. During the pandemic, alternative forms of final assessments became the norm in some schools and

though classrooms have largely returned to pre-pandemic operation, some students across this country are still taking fewer exams. Louis Villante is a distinguished professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Jason Bradshaw is a grade 11 and 12 science teacher at Castlebrook Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario. Jason also won the 2021 Prime Minister's Award for Excellence in Teaching and they are both here to talk about the value of exams. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Good morning. Jason, you are, is this correct? You're about to administer an exam today. Yes, as soon as we finish here today,

I'm going to be heading into school and my grade 11 students will be writing a biology exam. How are your students handling this time of the year? How stressed do you think they are this morning? They are very stressed. And I think it's largely because of the emphasis that we put on grades and marks in school and the final exam is obviously going to be a significant part of that.

So it's a very high stakes task for them and that puts enormous stress on them. We just heard from a number of students in Vancouver, they're stressed out and some of them like the exams but others are not particularly pleased and they worry about how much weight we are putting on the grades that come out of this. How much weight do you place on exams in terms of their overall marks? What is the, for example, the exam today that your students are taking the bio exam, how much will that shape their final mark? So it actually accounts for 20% of their final grade. And is that, do you think, something that's different perhaps in the wake of the pandemic?

When we, I talked in the introduction about how maybe we thought differently, but how we assess students. I think the emphasis on exams began to change even before the pandemic. Not too long ago, it used to be that a final exam would almost always be worth at least 30% of the final grade. But in more recent years, we've now broken down that 30% into smaller pieces. So now what students might do is they may have an exam that accounts for 20% and a final summative task that might account for 10% or it might even be 15 and 15.

So the idea is to reduce the emphasis on a single task. Lou, you've been listening in and one of the things that you have said in past is that you are a big advocate, these are your words, you're a big advocate of other forms of assessment but at the end of the day, most academics, students should sit for an exam for two hours that is worth 30% of their grade.

Why do you believe that? Well, I mean, I think, you know, if you take a look at where the average student from, say, grade 12 is going, about two-thirds of them are heading to post-secondary, okay? Canada, for the listeners, was the first country in the world to get to a level called universal access, which basically means more than 50% of our students are heading to university or college. And so when you think about where those students are going to be next year, they're going to be in first and second year

courses, which are quite large, which have a very strong emphasis on traditional assessment. And I'm talking about tests and exams. And in many cases, I have the emphasis on selected response, multiple choice. So when they move in to the post-secondary environment, they're going to be faced with exams that are usually more than even 30%. I mean, it's not unusual for a student to sit an exam worth 40, 50% of their final grade. So I do agree though that you can break it down. So I am well aware that, you know,

many students will do a culminating activity worth 20% and a final exam worth, sorry, culminating worth 10% and a final exam worth 20%. And that's, there's nothing wrong with that. But I will tell you though that often what high school teachers do is they have the culminating so close to the final exam. And that creates additional stress for the student because while they're preparing their culminating, that's cutting into their time to prepare for the final exam.

So I would like to see that culminating come a little bit earlier so that there's more time. But just to your point, I mean, if we aren't testing students in the same way, you're concerned that when they get to university or college, or maybe if they are writing, you know, an exam for licensing because they want to become an electrician or a plumber,

that they won't be prepared for that. Absolutely, and I think the type of anxiety they're gonna experience is gonna be even more so because they don't have that experience, right? And so obviously, I agree with a lot of what was said in that introduction. I mean there there are some students that are better at this. We call that test-wiseness, right? And in fact, there's controlled studies where we've shown that students that have those test-wiseness skills actually perform

significantly better. So I think as educators, we have to prepare them for that type of environment. We also need to develop better tests because what you heard often was, hey, you know, if I memorize a lot, I do well on tests. But unfortunately, when they move on to post-secondary, the professors are using test banks

and they can choose conceptual understanding questions, higher order thinking questions, which memorization doesn't help you for that. They struggle. We need to have a better connection between what they experience in high school and what they will ultimately experience when they move on. Jason, how worried are you that if we cut back on the number of exams that students are taking, to Louis' point, they won't be prepared when they go off to life after high school?

Well, Louis raised a number of good points and test taking is indeed a skill. It is something that's part of life as we take other tests within life for professional qualifications or even just taking a driving test. Our first step is usually a written exam. So absolutely it's important that students do continue to take these kinds of evaluations. I think that they're not going anywhere in

the immediate future. I think we're always going to have high school students writing some form of exam. And even if not a final exam throughout the course of their semester, they will be doing other types of evaluations that simulate this exam environment. What about the sense that some students have that they're just, if they memorize the work, they aren't actually being tested on what they learned. Jason, how well do you think exams do

at evaluating a student's knowledge on a specific subject? Well again, a very good point about that was previously raised that as educators we do have a responsibility to make sure that we are asking questions that are looking for deep understanding and not just memorization and regurgitation of information. Because I think a lot of students will tell you that after writing an exam, they do forget a lot of what they had studied. And that to me speaks to exams that are maybe not being created in a way that is focusing on testing student understanding and conceptual mastery

as opposed to just regurgitating facts. So it really is the responsibility of us educators to make sure that we're creating assessments that are evaluating what we want to actually look for. Louis, do you wanna talk a little bit about stress? One of the things we heard from the students, but also from the parents that we heard from, is the stress that exams can cause.

And we know that students face any number of mental health pressures post-pandemic, but just because they're young people and they're going through all sorts of things in their lives. If you focus less on exams, could that help with the stress that teens are facing, Louis? I think you're just delaying the stress that inevitably they're going to face. I think what I've tried to emphasize in some of the writing that I've done in publications is teaching them those skills to manage, for instance, test anxiety, right? There's a number of things we can do, both from the student's perspective, but also from the teacher's perspective.

One of the comments made in the introduction is, you know, I might be asked a question, a tricky question that, you know, seems a little bit peripheral to what we learned. Well, that's just bad test design. So I think if we can improve the type of tests that we administer to students, their anxiety will go down. What you often hear from students is, you know, I studied everything that was taught in class, but the test asked me a bunch of questions that we really didn't cover. And you know, obviously that's going to create anxiety for anybody, right? So I think there needs to be

a recognition of the fact that number one, there are some strategies we can use to help bring down their anxiety. But number two, eliminating all test anxiety or any kind of anxiety in any kind of on-demand assessment environment is just unrealistic. That's part of life in some ways, that life is stressful. I mean, I'm not suggesting that you're putting undue stress on these young people, but that life is stressful and you can't actually take that stress out of their lives. No, and absolutely not.

I mean, there's an interesting relationship between sort of anxiety and performance. When anxiety is very low, performance is low. When anxiety is very high, performance is low. When anxiety or arousal is in the middle, performance is optimal. So what that tells us is that students actually need to care enough that they put the effort in. They might have a little bit of butterflies in their stomach to perform optimally.

We obviously are always trying to move students to the left. We want them to have less anxiety. We don't wanna create anxiety for them. But this idea that zero anxiety is gonna lead to a positive sort of performance is, it's incorrect. I want to come back to some of the strategies that you have in a moment, but Jason, what do you make of that? I mean, your students right now, I'm sure their guts are churning as they are getting ready to go and sit in this room and be tested. Is that just part of

life in some ways? It is indeed. And I agree with what Louis is saying that anxiety can't be fully eliminated nor should it be that is a part of life. I think that when it comes to test taking and exams a good way of dealing with that is to make sure that students are practicing and having these experiences throughout the semester so that we do practice taking tests and various kinds of evaluations at lower stakes so that they do not feel overwhelmed when they are now faced with the final exam. It's always going to be something that causes stress and anxiety for them but it shouldn't be their first time experiencing that type

of feeling. We do need to help them become accustomed to it in more lower stakes scenarios, and that is going to indeed help with their comfort. I don't want to go too deep down the AI rabbit hole, but we know, I mean, this is not breaking news that students are using chat GPT to help with their schoolwork. Does it matter in that context, Jason, that there is something like an exam where you can't have AI write your exam because you're there in front of, you know, the administrator, the teacher, and it's you. Absolutely, and that is one of the key benefits of

having a traditional exam. It is one of the truly AI-proof ways of evaluating student knowledge. If you put the student in front of a piece of paper with nothing but a pencil, then we can be confident that the work they're producing is authentic and genuine. So especially since the pandemic, we obviously had to switch to different kinds of evaluation during the pandemic, just as was previously mentioned, but we could never be sure about what students were producing in terms of it being authentic to their own work. So now that we're back in the classroom, we definitely do want to emphasize on AI proof evaluations, definitely. So there's definitely a need to have things like exams where we can be confident in what students are producing. And so students are going to be writing exams. Let's just take the last few minutes that we have to talk about how to ensure that they are better prepared.

Louis, you used the phrase test-wiseness earlier on, and part of this is about making sure, sure, there's going to be some anxiety, but that the anxiety doesn't overwhelm them. What can we and what can you do to make sure that those students feel comfortable and feel prepared when they head into the exam? Well, I think the teachers already outlined a couple of strategies that are noted in the literature, so obviously giving them those opportunities in a more low-stakes environment.

Also, well-designed tests, tests that have good questions to them that have been covered. So you're thinking, I'm thinking now in terms of content validity, meaning there's a good match between what they've learned and what's covered on the test. Also adjusting tests so that there's a mixture of selected and constructed response. Selected response is multiple choice, true or false, matching. You're selecting the response and constructed responses short answer extended. So we want a mixture of questions that we're asking students because it's tapping into different types of knowledge and skills they would have learned

and can apply. And then of course there's also just the general test taking strategies, telling students, for instance, read the question entirely, preview the entire test before you get started, skip over difficult questions and go back to them, manage your time, recognize how much time you have versus how many questions you're being asked. Also for teachers to make sure that they design the test that 90% of the students can finish with 15 minutes to go. Often students have anxiety because they're asked

too many questions in the amount of time they're given and we really don't want to put them in a timed environment. We really want to test them in a way where all of them can actually have an opportunity to complete the exam. So those are strategies for both the students and also for the teachers. Having flashbacks to my high school years, which is a long time ago. Jason, you have the exam coming up. How do we make sure that your students who are walking into that room are prepared but also comfortable for what is going to unfold. So those are all very good points

that have been raised already. I would add to that that maybe it's a bit of an unpopular opinion, but an exam shouldn't be designed to find out what students don't know. It should actually be designed to find out what they do know. And I think that's a very important philosophy that you need to have. What's the distinction between the two? So I think that there's a misconception that exams are about creating like gotcha moments or like having tricky questions to fool or deceive

students. But that's absolutely not what we're trying to do. We're trying to construct an evaluation that's going to allow every student to have an entry point and be successful in showing the knowledge that they do have and thus giving us a way to measure the extent of that knowledge, not look for ways to expose what they don't know. So it's a difference in looking for what they do know versus trying to kind of trick them into exposing what they don't know, if that makes any sense.

Absolutely, yeah. We'll let you both go, but do you think your students are prepared for what's going to unfold this morning? I hope so. I think I've done all I can to help them be prepared. So I, I, I'm very confident in them. Really good to talk to you both.

Thank you both for being here. Thank you. Have a good day. Jason Bradshaw is a high school science teacher at Castlebrook Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

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