F7 - Argumentative Essay

Topic: In the past, it was believed that examinations were the only tried and tested form of assessing a student’s knowledge. However, more recently educationists have begun to favor the system of continuous assessment as a more fair and accurate way of assessing a student’s true ability.
Write an editorial for your school newspaper discussing the advantages and disadvantages of both systems, and giving reasons to support your opinions.
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Due to the shortcomings of the old examination system, educationalists have introduced the new education system of continuous assessment which is claimed to be able to assess a student’s true ability. People are questioning about the effectiveness of the new system. I am going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two different systems.

In the past, a common way of assessing a student’s knowledge is examination. It is believed to be able to help students concentrate on studies and learn more from books. With the examination, what they need to do is just doing homework and revision. Thus participation in extra-curricular activities would not be encouraged. Students are asked to focus on their schoolwork to make sure that they gain more knowledge and get better grades by the end of their academic years.

The examination system has created a great pressure on students. The once-for-all public examination will determine student’s fate: a further study or a full-stop to study. A bright future is waving its hands to the successful candidates while a despairing outcome is striking the failures. No wonder students are really anxious about their public examination results. We could easily find news that the failed candidates committed suicide because they thought they were hopeless as they had not done well in their examinations. 

The new system emphasizes that fair assessments should be used to evaluate students’ academic performance. In fact, continuous assessments can really help testing one’s true ability. Students may get good results by luck, yet they may not be so lucky all the time. In order to do well in continuous assessments, the essential criteria include both their mental ability and diligent work to prove some consistent results. Only those who perform consistently well with good attitude and knowledge can win the competition.

Nevertheless, no testing system is flawless. The continuous assessment system increases students’ workloads. The continuous system requires students to hand in a lot of project work to be marked. For example, students must do a lot of presentations or projects. Rather than staying home and study, students have to spend extra time completing the assignments with their classmates.

To conclude, I am in favor of the continuous assessment system. Though the old examination system can help students focus on their study, it also creates a lot of unnecessary pressure on students. The once-for-all examination may even result in poor senses of being failures and poorer students become more insecure about their future after the examinations. Continuous assessments give chances to students for making some gradual improvement. Besides, they allow students to further enhance their abilities for future success. You will agree with me that it is important for us not only to get our marks in the assessments but also to work with our strengths or weaknesses.