Should we do away with exams altogether? No, but we need to rethink their design and purpose

By Penny Van Bergen and Rod Lane. Over the past two decades there have been frequent calls to abandon exams. The major criticisms of exams in schools and universities tend to relate to either the misuse or overuse of exams, and not to the sensible use of exams in partnership with other assessment tasks such as presentations, research reports, creative responses, essays, reflective journals etc. More...